A bottom-up approach for estimating latent and sensible heat emissions from anthropogenic sources

A technique has been developed for estimating hourly and seasonal latent and sensible heat emission profiles from vehicles and the building sector at spatial scales down to the individual taxlot or parcel. The building energy component combines annual building energy simulations for prototypical buildings and commonly available geospatial data in a Geographical Information System (GIS) framework. The method for estimating emissions from the vehicle sector combines traffic data with GIS-based road link data. Hourly results for total anthropogenic latent or sensible heating can be extracted for any day and exported as a raster output at spatial scales as fine as an individual parcel (<100m). The target application for this approach is urban scale atmospheric modeling in support of urban heat island and air quality studies. In such applications the inclusion of high spatial and temporal resolution anthropogenic latent and sensible heating data represents a significant advancement.