The Urbanist

New paper: Evaluation of 30 urban land surface models in the Urban-PLUMBER project

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 16:33:20 +1100

The first model evaluation results from the Urban-PLUMBER project are now published!

New paper: Harmonized gap-filled data from 20 urban flux towers

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 14:44:52 +1100

Our new paper brings together 20 urban flux tower sites from around the world into a harmonised, gap filled, quality controlled collection. The collection is openly available. Read more by clicking here.

New paper: A transformation in city-descriptive input data

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:51:38 +1100

This post is a summary of our latest paper ^[1] and open dataset ^[2] on next generation city-descriptive input data for urban climate models.

Updated: How to create an xarray dataset from scratch, reproject and save

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 14:53:15 +1100

This is an updated post to show how to build an xarray dataset from scratch.

I’ve also shown how to reproject datasets to other coordinate systems using rioxarray, and write CF compliant coordinate mapping information to allow correct loading into software like QGIS.

Plotting OpenStreetMap images with Cartopy

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 22:42:32 +1100

This post shows code to import OpenStreetMap and satellite images into Python’s Cartopy.

Inputs are:

latitude
longitude
style (map or satellite)
radius (of circle)
npoints (number of random points to plot within the circle)

EGU2020 presentation: Urban-PLUMBER outline

Tue, 12 May 2020 18:16:31 +1000

I presented an introduction to the Urban-PLUMBER project at EGU 2020, held online rather than in Vienna as normal. Download the presentation here.

You can also read the latest about the project here: https://urban-plumber.github.io/.

How to create an xarray dataset from scratch

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 19:32:51 +0000

This is just a code snippet to remind myself how to build an xarray dataset.

Note: this post has been updated with further examples including spatial datasets HERE.

Urban-PLUMBER at AMS 2020

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 15:18:50 +1100

Note: see project website for latest information: urban-plumber.github.io

At the American Meteorological Society (AMS) 100th Annual Meeting we introduced Urban-PLUMBER: evaluation and benchmarking of land surface models in urban areas [1].

The project is a collaboration of modelling groups from around the world interested in improving the accuracy of weather and climate simulations in urban areas. Read how to get involved below, or download the Urban-PLUMBER poster for the 2020 AMS annual meeting here.

Fully coupled energy demand & climate simulations over Australia

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 14:55:26 +0100

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.

Journal articles

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 17:03:20 +1000

2024 Towards better understanding the urban environment and its interactions with regional climate change - The WCRP CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study URB-RCC Langendijk, Halenka, Hoffmann, Adinolfi, Aldama Campino, Asselin, Bastin, Bechtel, Belda, Bushenkova, Campanale, Chun, Constantinidou, Coppola, Demuzere, Doan, Evans, Feldmann, Fernandez, Fita, Hadjinicolaou, Hamdi, Hundhausen, Grawe, Johannsen, Milovac, Katragkou, Kerroumi, Kotlarski, Le Roy, Lemonsu, Lennard, Lipson, Mandal, Muñoz Pabón, Pavlidis, Pietikäinen, Raffa, Raluy-López, Rechid, Ito, Schulz, Soares, Takane, Teichmann, Thatcher, Top, Van Schaeybroeck, Wang, and Yuan.

How hot was 2018 in 10 Australian cities

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 16:03:43 +1100

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

CLEX annual workshop poster

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 16:58:31 +1100

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.

The UCLEM urban climate & energy model

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:42:11 +1100

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.

Conference posters

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 10:36:26 +1100

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.

Waste heat in New York and London

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 11:10:42 +1000

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

Writing a thesis in Markdown

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 13:52:20 +1100

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.

Using machine learning to find an optimal model set-up

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:23:53 +1000

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.

Waste heat in Melbourne

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 15:36:54 +1000

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.

About Mathew Lipson

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 15:11:56 +1000

My research is focused on developing better urban climate models. I’m currently running the Urban-PLUMBER model evaluation project, involving 30 urban models across 20 urban sites and a large number of international teams. Previously, I extended an urban model to include what’s going on inside buildings, predicting internal air temperatures and estimating how much energy will be used for heating and cooling. It’s also been coupled with a global climate model and been used to simulate urban climate and energy use interactions in future climates.

Solving the Heat Equation

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 12:54:50 +1000

This post describes how our interface conduction scheme is formulated and computed, and finishes with Fortran code which solves various approximations of the heat equation.

Conduction Schemes

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 12:12:23 +1000

Fortran code for two heat conduction schemes available here.

The method is explained in my post “Solving the heat equation” here.

An explanation of the conduction schemes are in my post “Improving heat storage in urban climate models”here.

Improving heat storage in urban climate models

Thu, 25 May 2017 18:53:30 +1000

In a new paper¹, we introduce a method to simulate how heat is conducted through roofs, walls and roads. We show it improves the simulation of heat storage and release, a very important process in urban climate.

Building a website

Mon, 15 May 2017 17:45:15 +1000

I’m new to building websites, so didn’t know where to begin.

I knew I wanted a simple end product that I had full control over at the lowest possible cost, and that I was comfortable with command line interfaces.

Here is where I ended up.

When the heat is on, we need city-wide plans to keep cool

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 14:12:23 +1000

Our cities are getting hotter. We can do something about it, but it isn’t a case of one-size-fits-all.