Destination Earth Urban Heat Service

VITO has developed an Urban Heat service as part of Destination Earth: a flagship initiative of the European Commission to develop an accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale. This Urban Heat service provides high-resolution urban heat maps for cities across Europe to underpin and motivate potential urban climate adaptation measures. The urban heat maps are generated by means of a physics-based high resolution urban climate model, UrbClim, nested within large-scale atmospheric output provided by state-of-the-art global climate models in the DestinE Digital Twin platform. UrbClim downscales the global climate model results for selected urban areas based on detailed terrain data, providing air temperature and thermal comfort indicators at a spatial resolution of 100m.

Following an extensive stakeholder engagement phase, urban heat maps for the demonstration cities Lisbon and Prague have been generated. The maps include an assessment of the current situation, future climate projections and 5 adaptation scenarios. Output of the model simulations was used as input to calculate a large number of urban heat indicators. An online viewer was developed to allow users to consult all resulting maps and to download the underlying model output data.

An analysis of the results from Lisbon and Prague was performed, showing that the applied climate change scenario has a negative impact on most heat stress indicators in both cities, but the severity depends on which indicator you consider, as air temperature (e.g. Tropical Nights) and extreme event-related (e.g. Lost Working Hours) indicators are impacted the most. The applied adaptation measures have a significant positive effect on most heat stress indicators in both cities, and the combination of different measures together is the most impactful way of improving the local heat stress situation. However, not all heat stress problems can be solved when applying these (outdoor) adaptation measures.