Last week I presented some initial results of our new building energy/ urban land surface model (UCLEM) ¹ coupled with an atmospheric climate model (CCAM) ² at the EGU 2019 conference.

You can read more about UCLEM here, but in short it responds to local weather and calculates energy consumed inside buildings (from heating and cooling and other energy use) and then emits that energy as waste heat back into the environment. In dense urban areas that waste heat can raise air temperature and cause convection, changing local weather in a feedback loop. Apart from that, it’s useful to know how much energy is being used in different weather conditions.

This first animation shows the air temperature over Eastern Australia, along with the energy used within buildings. The second is nested within the first for a higher resolution simulation over Melbourne.

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Two bits of great news:

• my PhD at UNSW Sydney has been approved,
• I’ve started a research position based at the University of Reading, UK.

I’m really excited to start a post-doctoral position which is a collaboration between UNSW Sydney and the University of Reading. I’m excited because I’ll be primarily based in Reading at the world-class Meteorology Department.

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Plots of yearly average temperatures in 10 cities, along with how 2018 ranked.

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Next week I’ll be at the annual workshop for ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) group. The workshop is a chance to hear about the work researchers have been doing over the last 12 months or so, and discuss future research goals.

Below is the poster I’ll be presenting. The images in this PDF version are higher quality.

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This post is a summary of our latest paper ^[1] on improving an urban climate model to better predict building energy consumption depending on local weather conditions, the structure of buildings and human behaviours.

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It’s been a while since I posted as I’ve been focussed on finishing the PhD thesis, which is now submitted. In the coming months I’ll be trying to summarise the work here and keep current research more up to date. In the meantime I’ll document some of the posters I’ve presented at workshops over the last few years.

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This extends a previous post on anthropogenic waste heat to include plots for New York and London.

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Writing an article in LaTeX produces crisp, quality documents and beautiful equations. However, it’s not very user friendly. Recently I’ve been using another language, Markdown, because I find it more readable and intuitive, but it still has LaTeX equation support. To me that’s the best of both worlds. So how about writing an entire PhD thesis in Markdown? This post shows you how.

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I’ve recently finished developing a computational model which predicts the heating and cooling energy demands of a neighbourhood based on building characteristics, meteorological conditions and the behaviour of people. However, I don’t have a perfect and complete set of observations to describe the system, and I am finding it difficult to find appropriate values for some parameters. So I’ve used machine learning to help.

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Cities can be much hotter than surrounding regions. This is in part because of waste heat from our energy use. This post shows how much waste heat is emitted during a typical day into Melbourne, Australia.

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