Urban Extreme Climate Adaptation Digital Twin (UrbExt DT)

As the climate warms, regions like northern Europe and Africa will face unprecedented extreme weather events. Record-breaking heat waves and more frequent cloudbursts in densely populated urban areas would have devastating effects, making effective emergency management and climate adaptation essential. UrbExt DT aims to equip decision-makers with the tools and knowledge needed to prepare for and respond to the unprecedented extreme weather events that will become more common and more severe in the future, helping cities become more resilient and sustainable.

With input from users in municipalities in the Gothenburg Region and the City of Cape Town, project researchers will make use of a novel Digital Twin of an urban environment which combines a state-of-the-art regional climate model with machine-learning-based components that allow the rapid testing of different scenarios and an interactive visualisation interface. Users will be able to adapt the model and adjust parameters to their own needs.

Project goals:

UrbExt DT will significantly advance the current state of knowledge and the state-of-the-art approaches to urban preparedness for extreme events through the following objectives:

1. Generate hectometre-scale (100-metre) climate data to accurately capture urban complexity, using a novel machine-learning (ML) emulator and Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Model.
2. User-driven parametric modifications. The new methodology enables the modelling of different urban development scenarios - landscape developments such as buildings, trees and roads; economy; pollutant emissions; population growth etc. This will allow decision-makers to adjust, reproduce, or modify these scenarios to test different approaches to urban development.
3. Deliver projections for how soon in the future extreme events of a given intensity are likely to occur, and better characterise these events and the meteorological conditions associated with them based on high-resolution climate data. Providing these insights at urban scale will help cities prepare earlier and plan more effectively for future extreme events.
4. Explore the unresolved question of how urbanization influences extreme precipitation and the synergistic mechanisms between urban heat islands and heat waves. Understanding these feedbacks is crucial for understanding how urban planning influences extreme event timing and can guide sustainable urban development.
5. UrbExt DT focuses on Sweden and Africa but adopts a global perspective. By developing tools that work in both settings, the project addresses vulnerabilities in small, medium and large cities alike and lays the groundwork for global scalability.