Urban Cooling Model - Blending distance & cooling range & AOI

Software Support
1

Hi All,

I’m currently using the InVEST UCM tool for assessing a small scale urban greening project - the site is rather small (approx. 200m x 300m) with the proposed road only 10m wide in the middle of the site. The site is sitting in central London and the buildings around are very dense. See the image attached.

I suppose the surrounding environment should be taken into account when conducting the simulation, as they might have effects on the site. What I’m unsure about is how much of the surrounding/neighbors should be taken into account when I define my Area of Interest, and what parameters should I set for the air blending distance and cooling range for this scale of analysis, or is this scale simply not suitable for this kind of analysis? I want to get the benefits it has on the pedestrian pavement and the surrounding building facades which could lead to improved comfort and energy saving, but if I input a 600m blending distance as suggested it willl not show any localized difference as this is far larger than the site scale. (I’ve attached the two different outputs with 10m and 600m air blending distance)

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I understand that the thermal perception is not only related to the air temperature, is there a way you could suggest how that could possibly be reflected using the tool?

Please suggest what you think on this.

Many thanks!
Celia

2

Thanks for posting @celia and welcome to the forums!

I wonder if @chris or @royremme would have some thoughts on this.

Cheers,

~ Doug

3

Unfortunately, the Urban Cooling Model was developed and trained on data at a much coarser resolution than the application you are testing (e.g. city-wide rather than street-level). Conceptually there are likely micro-climate fluctuations based on the greenspace you are proposing in this project, but we haven’t tested the model at this scale so we can’t say its outputs reflect a scientifically accurate relationship between green space and temperature when used at the street level.

For thermal perception, the model currently calculates the wet-bulb globe temperature from air temperature and humidity, which is a step closer to the lived experience of heat in cities than simply using air temperature. However this is the only metric of thermal perception the model provides. We have trialed a few other health-based metrics as outputs (e.g. relative risk of mortality), but the results are pending publication and not built into the model itself.

Hope this helps and happy to answer further questions!

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