HEat Robustness In relation To AGEing cities (HERITAGE) Program: First results

The HERITAGE program develops a sensing and design system aiming at detection, reduction and prevention (by monitoring and design) of urban heat-stress occurring due to ageing built environment, through socio-technical solutions. The system will detect and forecast spatiotemporal patterns of heat stress at unprecedented resolutions (1m scale), aiming at technological solutions to reduce indoor and outdoor heat stress through developing urban design guidelines and connecting the energy transition, housing demands, repurposing areas, climate adaptation and digitalization.

This necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach involving earth observation, urban hydro-meteorology and climatology, urban design and sustainable infrastructural energy systems. Therefore, parallel to the sensing, research lines are rolled out on robust hydro-meteorological, design and energy solutions, at multiple spatiotemporal scales and forms. Concretely, these research lines fill knowledge gaps through innovative techniques for analysis, simulation, development and experimental testing of newly designed multiscale urban heritage canopy layer schemes for climate models, multiscale form-microclimatic relationships and sustainable energy systems, suited for application in aged neighborhoods and buildings.

Reflected and emitted solar and thermal radiation can be considered the main drivers for turbulent and radiative heat exchange and thus for urban heat. However, their use from remote sensing observations in urban areas is still in its infancy and rather simplistic in its modelling approach. The above-mentioned multiscale schemes and relationships will be mainly developed in the city of Enschede (and tested in the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Delft) for which we collect ground-based, air- and space-borne radiative observations and heat-exchanges at matching scales. We cover space-time resolutions from submeter to kilometer and from 100 Hz to hours, monitoring the exchange processes at the relevant scales. The observations will be employed to develop scale-dependent heat-exchange parameterizations, suitable for 3D city models at building-, street-, and neighborhood-level. Here, first observation and modelling results are presented.