DESTINATION EARTH – PILOT URBAN HEAT SERVICE

VITO and TECNALIA ^[1] research organizations are using Destination Earth’s Climate Change Adaptation digital twin (DE Climate DT) to develop a pilot service to help cities mitigate the risks of extreme heat and its impacts on public health, productivity, and urban infrastructure.

The Pilot Service will be integrated in the DestinE Service Platform (DESP) and will leverage the power of Destination Earth’s Data Lake (DEDL) by collecting climate and land use data to simulate current and future climate conditions and provide highly accurate data and actionable insights to inform urban climate adaptation strategies.

This will empower city administrations and stakeholders to understand and be more aware heat-related impacts by:

• Assessing current and future heat-related risks’ hazards and its impacts on human health and labor.
• Evaluating the effectiveness of climate adaptation measures, such as planting trees, adding vegetation on roofs or materials that reflect solar radiation, soil unsealing, incorporation of water features or changing color of buildings.

User engagement

This work will involve a well-structured user engagement process, in close collaboration with key city networks including Climate Alliance, Eurocities, ICLEI, and Resilient Cities Network, to ensure the service is co-designed with and for cities. These networks, deeply integrated within the Mission on Adaptation and its Community of Practice, will initially help gather the needs and requirements of local and regional authorities to better support heat-stress assessments and long-term adaptation planning. Later, they will play a crucial role in promoting the service to member cities, enhancing its scalability and ensuring its long-term adoption.

Service design

This Urban Heat service intends to provide high-resolution urban heat-indicators maps for cities across Europe to underpin and motivate urban climate adaptation measures that are being developed. The urban heat maps will be generated by means of a physics-based high resolution urban climate model, UrbClim, nested within large-scale atmospheric output provided by state-of-the-art global climate models in the DestinE Digital Twin platform.

The Urban Heat Service will be co-designed based on insights from the user engagement process, incorporating feedback from domain experts to guide the definition, development, and final delivery of the service. The ultimate goal is to deliver an operational service on the DestinE Service Platform (DESP), providing users with comprehensive, actionable insights to enhance heat-stress assessments and inform long-term adaptation planning.

Initial key features include:

• Spatial Resolution: 100-meter resolution for urban climate and impact indicators and 1-meter resolution for detailed assessments of selected sub-areas, allowing for precise neighbourhood and street-level analysis.
• Data Outputs: The service will provide a range of indicators, such as: number of tropical nights, exposure to heatwaves, heat-related mortality, lost working hours due to heat stress (based on ISO standards)
• User Interaction: An online platform where users will be able to select urban areas and sub-areas, define and evaluate local climate adaptation scenarios (e.g., green infrastructure), visualize and download data packages, including geospatial data formats (GeoTIFF, NetCDF), image files (PNG) and documentation.

A team of experts

A team of experts gathered to demonstrate the value of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin. 

To achieve the ambitious goals of this contract and deliver a high-performance operational service using high-resolution projections from Climate DT, VITO and TECNALIA have teamed up, leveraging their combined expertise and proven technical capabilities from prior European projects and Destination Earth contracts focused on heat stress.

VITO Climate Impacts group (CLIM) is leading this contract, complemented by members from the business unit of VITO “Environmental Intelligence (VITO-EI)” with expertise in quantitative assessment of climate related impacts and has recently successfully delivered a Earth Destination Earth use case to address urban heat island effect in Lisbon and Prague contracted by ECMWF.

TECNALIA Climate Change Adaptation team (ADCLIMA) is leading the user engagement process of this contact as they have experience developing projects for regional and local authorities related to climate resilience and has recently delivered an Adaptation Modelling Framework for Heat Stress Exposure  | Destination Earth to support the DT to develop an interactive tool to support the assessment of different adaptation strategies to minimize heat stress impacts on health in the Basque Region.

Implemented by VITO (coordinator) and Tecnalia       

Budget: € 350.000

Funded by ECMWF within the Destination Earth Framework

Destination Earth is a European Union funded initiative launched in 2022, with the aim to build a digital replica of the Earth system by 2030. The initiative is being jointly implemented by three entrusted entities: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) responsible for the creation of the first two ‘digital twins’ and the ‘Digital Twin Engine’, the European Space Agency (ESA) responsible for building the ‘Core Service Platform’, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), responsible for the creation of the ‘Data Lake’.   

More information about Destination Earth on the  EU Commission website       

For more information about ECMWF’s role, visit  ecmwf.int/DestinE