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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