Cooling Singapore 2.0: Researchers build nation's 'digital twin' to assess urban heat and find ways to cool city
Over the last four years, more than 20 researchers have built a "digital twin" of Singapore that allows users to simulate scenarios to figure out how to make living spaces more thermally comfortable for people. The data sets include islandwide vegetation cover, traffic patterns, heat emitted from industries, and weather-related data such as wind flow. The digital twin also taps information from complex climate models that run in the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore, said Ander Zozaya, project manager of Cooling Singapore 2.0 at the Singapore-ETH Centre.
To show the digital twin's capabilities, the team on May 30 conducted a demonstration to predict how temperatures islandwide will change if three forested areas were to be converted to industrial parks or residential complexes in 2030. And a future energy mix comprising some low-carbon electricity imports and more renewables could translate into a slight drop in electricity produced and heat released by local power plants.
There are also features in the virtual tool to help developers experiment with and find out how to optimise district cooling systems in their building projects.