Hyperlocal Evaluation Toolkit for Resiliency (HEATRACE): A Coupled Land-Atmosphere Digital-Twin for Forecasting Hyperlocal Urban Heat Stress

The scientific community has demonstrated that future climate will result in added local heat stress to urban communities as we continue to realize the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Recent studies have also highlighted the inequity of these heat effects as they are oftentimes worse in low-income and industrialized neighborhoods. Measurements suggest that the local heterogeneity of heat stress in urban areas is a function of climate/weather, landuse types and their radiative properties, and atmospheric ventilation. In the past, it has been difficult for urban planners to explicitly model these effects at the spatial and temporal scales (i.e., street level) that are relevant to their problem set. When forecasting next day heat stress or attempting to understand the effects that urban planning decisions may have on localized heat stress in future climate scenarios, urban planners must be able to simulate these thermodynamic effects at meter scale resolution. For next-day forecasting and alerting, these simulation tools must be able to run fast enough to be implemented in an operational setting (i.e., faster than real-time). The Joint Outdoor-indoor Large Eddy Simulation (JOULES) is a full physics, building and terrain aware, atmospheric simulation that couples a state-of-the-art land surface model to explicitly resolve the sensible and latent heat fluxes from various landuse types with both short and long wave radiation inputs. JOULES has also been implemented to run on a Graphical Processing Unit, allowing accelerated simulations of urban domains to be run faster than real-time.

In recent studies, Aeris LLC and its collaborators at The MITRE Corporation have shown that JOULES is able to recreate the heterogeneous local heat stress observed by mobile surveys when forced with historical forecast meteorology. Aeris has since extended the use of JOULES as a coupled land-atmosphere digital-twin to compute heat metrics with either forecast (0—4 days with products like the NOAA High Resolution Rapid Refresh forecast (HRRR)) or future climate scenarios (i.e., CMIP). After significant verification and validation of this capability, Aeris has deployed HEATRACE (The Hyperlocal Evaluation Toolkit for Resiliency), a web-based user interface to interact with the JOULES model to simulate environmental scenarios and outcomes pertinent to urban resiliency interests. Designed and developed in collaboration with MITRE, this capability includes the set up and execution of simulations that provide comprehensive assessments of environmental conditions and alternatives of interest to urban planning, public health, and climate sustainability and equity stakeholders. HEATRACE is based on the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) and leverages a robust geospatial mapping interface that allows users to perform analysis to derive secondary products and heat metrics that are specific to their use-case. Several output metrics are currently supported that enable both next-day heat hazard alerting and urban planning for future climate scenarios.

In this presentation, Aeris will demonstrate the functionality of the user interface and the execution of a JOULES simulation using forecast meteorology, we will also present the post-processing, analysis, and output capabilities and how those can be leveraged by stakeholders.

Approved for Public Release by The MITRE Corporation. Distribution Unlimited. 23-2935