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Abstract
The increase in air temperature produced by urbanization, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect, is often neglected in current building energy simulation practices. The UHI effect can have an impact on the energy consumption of buildings, especially those with low internal heat gains or with an inherent close interaction with the outdoor environment (e.g. naturally-ventilated buildings). This paper presents an urban weather generator (UWG) to calculate air temperatures inside urban canyons from measurements at an operational weather station located in an open area outside a city. The model can be used alone or integrated into existing programmes in order to account for the UHI effect in building energy simulations. The UWG is evaluated against field data from Basel (Switzerland) and Toulouse (France). The error of UWG predictions stays within the range of air temperature variability observed in different locations of the same urban area.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Singapore National Research Foundation through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre for Environmental Sensing and Modelling (CENSAM) and the MIT/Masdar Institute of Science. Researchers from the GAME/CNRM (Météo-France, CNRS) were supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant ANR-09-VILL-0003 and the Scientific Cooperation Foundation STAE in Toulouse in the context of the MUSCADE and the ACCLIMAT projects, respectively. We would also like to thank Dr. Roland Vogt for sharing the BUBBLE data with us.