Modelling spatial variation of thermal comfort indices in urban settings performed within an open source GIS

The Urban Multi-scale Environmental Predictor (UMEP) is a city based climate service tool that facilitate user-friendly open source capabilities to combine models and tools essential for climate simulations. The tool is designed for a broad range of users, both within academia as well as practitioners and non-expert users. UMEP is available as a plugin in QGIS, a free and open source geographic information system (GIS) available on all common platforms. One main purpose with UMEP is to include pre-processing of geo- and weather data, process calculations as well as post-processing and visualisation in the same tool.

Recent developments in UMEP enables creation of all essential input variables required to generate high-resolution raster grid of common human thermal comfort indices such as Physiological Equivalent Temperate (PET), Universal Thermal Comfort Index (UTCI), Comfort Formula (COMFA) etc. This work presents initial results and methodology used to compute these indices within UMEP. Examples of workflow throughout the process, all the way to the final result, will be presented and discussed.

Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 896069.