Examining equity and resilience to extreme heat in 14 US major cities using GPU-accelerated urban microclimate modelling

Keywords: Urban extreme heat, climate equity and resilience, urban microclimate modeling, GIS, GPU parallel computing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 71

Abstract

The increasingly frequent and intense extreme heat events in large U.S. cities cause more climate-related mortalities than any other hazardous weather event. In the context of global warming and urban heat island, heat waves are supposed to be more frequent and intense in many cities. The extreme urban heat is not distributed evenly across neighborhoods of cities, and not all populations are impacted by the extreme heat equally. A fine level of quantitative information about where and which populations are vulnerable to heat is important to identify the most vulnerable neighborhoods and populations in order to mitigate the negative impacts of heat on urban residents. Different from the previously widely used land surface temperature, this study proposed to use the mean radiant temperature (Tmrt), which is more reasonable to indicate human heat stress, to indicate the distribution of urban heat in 14 US major US cities. The SOLWEIG (SOlar and LongWave Environmental Irradiance Geometry) model was applied to map the Tmrt in Philadelphia based on the high-resolution (1m) urban 3D model and meteorological data using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallel computing. This study further investigated the different heat exposure levels of different neighborhoods and population groups. The results of this study would be directly applicable for guiding urban landscape design and urban planning for mitigating the negative impacts of extreme heat.