Response of City Building Energy Use Modeling to Heat Waves and Urban Heat Island

Keywords: Building energy use, Heatwaves, Urban Heat Island, CityBEUM
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

The building sector consumes more than one-third of the world’s primary energy. Urban heat island (UHI) and heatwave (HW) with large local and regional variations can significantly influence building energy use in urban areas. However, the availability of temperature data limits the potential of city building energy use models for studying the impact of UHI and HW on building energy use. In this study, we investigated building energy use at high spatiotemporal resolutions under UHI and HW in two cities of Boston and Des Moines, United States using a city-scale building energy use modeling (CityBEUM) driven by temperature by fusing data from satellite remote sensing, weather stations, and WRF modeling. We found that UHI and HW can significantly increase building cooling energy use, but such impact varies significantly between cities and is also different between daytime and nighttime. Our findings suggest that the improvement of buildings in suburban areas outside of the urban core is important to mitigate the city-level building cooling energy use and associate emissions with the increasing frequency of HW events and intensifying UHI effect.