<p>Accurate and agile modelling of weather, climate, hydrology and air quality in cities is essential for delivering integrated urban services. SUEWS (Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme) allows simulation of urban&#8211;atmospheric interactions by quantifying the energy, water and carbon fluxes.&#160; SuPy (SUEWS in Python) provides the SUEWS computation kernel, a Python-based data stack that streamlines pre-processing, computation and post-processing to facilitate common urban climate modelling. This paper documents the recent developments in both SuPy and SUEWS, and the background principles of their interface, F2PY (Fortran to Python) configuration and Python front-end implementation. SuPy is deployed via PyPI (Python Package Index) allowing an automated workflow for cross-platform compilation on all mainstream operating systems (Windows, Linux and macOS). The online tutorials, using Jupyter Notebooks, allow users to become familiar with SuPy. A brief overview of other complementary SUEWS developments will be given, and include within canopy layer profiles of temperature, humidity, wind, and radiation that are supporting a wide range of applications; and database developments for obtaining model parameters.</p>
<p>Warm weather can have negative effects on the health and wellbeing of humans, especially risk groups e.g. children. Methods for estimating thermal comfort and physiological stress outdoors are not developed or adjusted for children. A consequence of this is few existing studies on children and thermal comfort and heat stress, particularly in a Swedish context. Children are at higher risk of heat stress than adults because of a larger body-surface-area to body-mass-ratio, lower sweat rate and that they are less aware of their thermal status. Swedish children attending preschool spend around three hours per day outdoors and the effects of weather and outdoor environment design on children&#8217;s thermal comfort are not clear. By better understanding how weather affects children's thermal comfort, measures can be taken to reduce heat stress and increase children's health and wellbeing.</p><p>Here we present results from a project on the effect of warm weather on Swedish preschooler&#8217;s health and wellbeing. The results are based on detailed observations and simulations for present day climate as well as future climate change scenarios and give indications on exposure to heat stress and potential implications on the health and wellbeing of the children. For example, two thirds of preschool yards in Gothenburg are exposed to strong heat stress on clear and warm days. Strong heat stress have negative consequences for the pedagogic activities and wellbeing. Moreover, days with strong heat stress will increase in the future in exposed yards, whereas yards with sufficient shade are less prone to heat stress.</p>
<p>The Urban Multi-scale Environmental Predictor (UMEP) is a city based climate service tool that facilitate user-friendly open source capabilities to combine models and tools essential for climate simulations. The tool is designed for a broad range of users, both within academia as well as practitioners and non-expert users. UMEP is available as a plugin in QGIS, a free and open source geographic information system (GIS) available on all common platforms. One main purpose with UMEP is to include pre-processing of geo- and weather data, process calculations as well as post-processing and visualisation in the same tool.</p><p>Recent developments in UMEP enables creation of all essential input variables required to generate high-resolution raster grid of common human thermal comfort indices such as Physiological Equivalent Temperate (PET), Universal Thermal Comfort Index (UTCI), Comfort Formula (COMFA) etc. This work presents initial results and methodology used to compute these indices within UMEP. Examples of workflow throughout the process, all the way to the final result, will be presented and discussed.</p>
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