Atmospheric Urban Digital Twins (AUDTs) - Definition, Examples, and Case Studies

As cities become increasingly susceptible to the vagaries of weather and climate extremes, there is growing need for datasets, and tools that can be used in city-based decisions, and climate adaptation / mitigation and action planning. Digital twins have been one of the mode by which the weather and climate information has been made more usable and available to these urban end users.

As part of series of workshops and meetings under the auspices of the WCRP Digital Earth lighthouse activity, WWRP endorsed UNESCO City Climate CoLab, and NSF AUDT workshop series, elements of the urban digital twin characteristics and definitions have started to emerge. This presentation will summarize these findings in terms of the definition emerging for AUDTs as: scalable, fast, domain based, decision and stakeholder specific, and often with visualization capabilities.  The DTs have an element of ML/AI aspects integrated but often not necessary if the goal is visualization alone. 

Example cases of how Urban DT applications have been developed for urban fire and smoke transport, carbon emissions, tree planting, urban heat mapping,  campus and city current and future climate energy use, and urban risk from hazards such as landfall hurricanes will be presented.

Future strategies for open data balanced with ethics of downscaled urban datasets using digital twins will also be discussed.