KPF’s Design Technology team developed a real-time digital model of an urban microclimate and made it available to outdoor space users through an easy-to-use web app.
Although weather and climate patterns happen at a regional or even continental scale, the human thermal experience in an urban space is modified by small-scale factors, such as shade from trees, a cooling breeze, or hot asphalt on a summer day. To quantify these experiences and map how a person would experience an outdoor environment in New York City in real time, KPF developed a comprehensive digital twin of Bryant Park’s thermal microclimate.
A custom web application gathers real-time forecasts and historical data for temperature, sky coverage, wind, humidity, and solar radiation from multiple sources to offer a complete picture of conditions in every corner of the park. By combining this data with detailed, 3D building geometry, KPF’s custom digital model runs a suite of environmental simulations including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), solar radiation, and mean radiant temperature models, to quantify how the built environment impacts comfort.
These analyses provide a detailed understanding of how a person will feel as they move through the park. The cloud-based model is optimized for efficient processing, running data-intensive simulations daily, while incorporating highly variable sub-hourly data. KPF’s UI/UX and software development experts deployed the digital twin through an interface available through web browser, mobile device, or building display screen for users and occupants to view in real time, helping people better enjoy this outdoor space and provide feedback on comfort metrics.
