Building scenarios, addressing urban heat
The Cooling Singapore project shared details of their Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) at their CS Symposium and to The Straits Times on 30 May and 2 June respectively.
The Cooling Singapore (CS) project formally debuted their Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) Explorer at their CS Symposium on 30 June.
Four years in the making, the DUCT Explorer is a virtual simulation of Singapore's space, urban fabric, anthropogenic heat-emitting activities and weather conditions (i.e. a 'digital twin'). It allows urban planners to simulate and analyse scenarios to cool down urban areas without resorting to time-consuming projects.
At the Symposium, researchers from Cooling Singapore demonstrated the DUCT's features on a city-wide scale (mesoscale) and district-level (microscale). This was followed by a hands-on demo and poster presentation where attendees could use the DUCT for themselves.
Some of the what-if scenarios that Cooling Singapore illustrated, among them urban development milestones mentioned in the Singapore Green Plan 2030, were:
- What is the effect on urban temperatures if selected green areas in the city were converted to built-up residential estates?
- How would urban temperatures be affected if al vehicles were electrified?
- What is the effect of wind corridors (and therefore urban temperatures) if certain areas were developed into high-rise residential estates?
- What are the optimal solutions to connect a neighbourhood in a District Cooling network?
- How do building shapes and vegetation affect the Urban Heat Island effect in a residential neighbourhood?
Ander Zozaya, Project Manager of Cooling Singapore, mentioned that the DUCT's ability to run these scenarios is powered by data-sets, including climate data, some of which the team had to collect in the field. He invited interested parties to connect with the project to fine-tune and test the DUCT.
The DUCT was also presented at the recent World Cities Summit 2024 on 2-4 June by Dr Kristina Orehounig, the Lead Principal Investigator of Cooling Singapore.
The demonstrations at the Symposium were external page also covered in an article in The Straits Times. The story focuses on how the scenario-building in the DUCT works, the data required to power the DUCT and images of the protoype.
Read: external page 'Researchers build ‘digital twin’ of Singapore to assess urban heat, find ways to cool city' in The Straits Times on 2 June.