MICROCLIMATE SIMULATION

In the past few years, it has become a worldwide interest in how urban design impacts outdoor thermal comfort. Enhancing the health and well-being of citizens, reducing heat stress, and extending periods of comfort, are now considered as one of the most important aspects of design. Urbanization can have significant effects on local weather and climate making it significantly warmer than the surrounding rural areas. Typical examples of urbanization are:

• replacing natural land cover with pavements;
• concrete buildings and other infrastructures that take away the natural cooling effects; and
• tall buildings and narrow streets that can heat the air trapped between them and reduce airflow.

The increased air temperature, as a result of the heat island effect, will lead to heat stress and increase in the cooling loads and energy demand for buildings. Accordingly, there is a need for developing assessment tools and simulation models that will assist in predicting and mitigating the heat island effect and improving the outdoor comfort.

EMergy has experience using both technical references and custom methods to simulate microclimate conditions, assess thermal comfort, and design passive and active outdoor comfort strategies. This experience includes microclimate simulation, and developing a wide range of cooling solutions that are sustainably suitable for outdoor applications. Simulation of microclimate conditions may require the use of various simulation software, selection tools, custom spreadsheet calculations, and/or prescriptive calculation tools.

For most projects that require microclimate simulation, EMergy uses Meso-NH, Surfex, TEB, BEM and ENVI-met that help explore and evaluate the mesoscale and microscale environmental conditions; when necessary, we use Ladybug and Honeybee, which are open-source simulation tools.