PhD in Sustainable development and cooperation

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Curriculum vitae

Phd thesis

Global cities account for over 70 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions. Even being one of the largest contributors to the world climate crisis, cities are also expected to be the most affected by it. One of the imperative issues encountering urban areas is the Urban Heat Island(UHI) Effect which will have considerable impacts on the health, thermal comfort, air quality, and energy consumption of the buildings inside the cities.
There are several background studies happened regarding the factors that generate and define the intensity of urban heat islands. While the evapotranspiration, building materials, and shading effects have been examined extensively by the research community, understanding of the wind profiles inside the urban areas is still limited. Insights into the influence on air ventilation and heat transfer are pivotal for the mitigation of urban heat islands. The existing meteorological model simulations consider rough and simple urban models to study the urban environment which cannot accurately predict the wind profiles inside the cities. This is very important since wind speed and wind direction have a significant influence in defining the urban environment. The current research, therefore, aspires to bridge the gap in micro-climatic research related to the accurate prediction of wind and temperature profiles inside the cities by considering detailed urban features.
The research aims to develop a proof-of-concept methodology that can accurately predict the urban microclimate by effectively downscaling the mesoscale model by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). CFD analysis preserves the required resolution at finer scales while combining it with a mesoscale model provides an affordable level of computational cost for the whole analysis. This integrated proposal not only allows for designing high resilient cities but also aids to study the urban environments that can mitigate the adverse impacts of future climate scenarios.

Keywords:
Urban He at Island( UHI effect, global warming, sustainable cities, Weat her Research
and Forecast( WRF models, Computational Fluid Dynamics( CFD )), urban microclimate

Targeted SGDs
1. SDG 11: On stainable cities and communities
2. SDG 13 : Climate action
3. SDG 15: Life on land
4. SDG 3 Good health and well being

The proposed algorithm to couple the mesoscale(WRF) model with the microscale(CFD) model is shown in the figure below.

Research activities

Lippin Pauly et.al "Numerical Investigation of Thermal Patterns and Local Wind Circulations to Characterize Urban Heat Island During a Heatwave in Turin ". Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4530212 (Preprint)

Pauly, L., Ferrero, E., and Canonico, M.: Evaluating the Impact of Urbanization on Thermal Comfort in Turin: A Numerical Simulation Study, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-62, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-62, 2023