From Station to Stakeholder – A data pipeline to bridge the information gap between measurements and administrative needs

Recently, human-centered urban heat assessment and adaptation planning have become increasingly relevant to local governments, leading to the development of numerous plans to address related issues. However, policies that integrate the latest scientific methods and tools are rarely implemented. To guide decision-making, budget planning and policy development, data-driven approaches are gaining more attention. These require local and scientific knowledge to collect relevant data sets, provide interpretation guidelines for city departments, and deliver tailored decision-relevant data at the right time.

The Data2Resilience (D2R) project aims to develop an informative, data-driven dashboard that enables city officials and citizens to learn about thermal comfort, access current heat stress throughout the city and thereby adapt to urban heat conditions. This is achieved with a biometeorological measurement network consisting of 80 stations, which was designed and implemented with the city of Dortmund. The stations are under ownership of the city and part of the smart city ecosystem, which ensures long-term maintenance and data availability. This effort is complemented with a near real-time service that models thermal comfort based on SOLWEIG, using as input in-situ measurements and NWPs from ICON-D2. The output data are provided with a 3 m spatial resolution, to enable street-level decision-making. The results of both approaches are stored in databases and a backend was developed to make this data accessible via an API, which finally serves as the backend of a dashboard to visualize the meteorological conditions of the city for various stakeholders in Dortmund. The dashboard facilitates the exploration and interaction with station data and modeling results to gain a deeper understanding of the local differences of heat stress, while delivering objective numbers to argue and guide heat adaptation measures.