Document Type

Article

Source Publication Title

Buildings & Cities (Ubiquity Press)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.17

Abstract

Climate predictions indicate a strong likelihood of more frequent, intense heat events. Resource-vulnerable, low-income neighbourhood populations are likely to be strongly impacted by future climate change, especially with respect to an energy burden. In order to identify existing and new vulnerabilities to climate change, local authorities need to understand the dynamics of extreme heat events at the neighbourhood level, particularly to identify those people who are adversely affected. A new comprehensive framework is presented that integrates human and biophysical data: occupancy/behaviour, building energy use, future climate scenarios and near-building microclimate projections. The framework is used to create an urban energy model for a low-resource neighbourhood in Des Moines, Iowa, US. Data were integrated into urban modelling interface (umi) software simulations, based on detailed surveys of residents’ practices, their buildings and near-building microclimates (tree canopy effects, etc.). The simulations predict annual and seasonal building energy use in response to different climate scenarios. Preliminary results, based on 50 simulation runs with different variable combinations, indicate the importance of using locally derived building occupant schedules and point toward increased summer cooling demand and increased vulnerability for parts of the population.

Disciplines

Engineering | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Publication Date

7-30-2020

Language

English

Comments

© 2020 The Author(s)

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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