Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

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Building and Environment

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/buildenv

Towards scalable and actionable pedestrian outdoor thermal comfort

estimation: A progressive modelling approach
Sarah Mokhtar *, Christoph Reinhart
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The outdoor microclimate highly affects the quality of urban outdoor spaces which are essential to a city’s socio-
Outdoor thermal comfort economic vitality. Due to the complexity associated with estimating outdoor thermal comfort (OTC), its study is
Performance-informed design currently only feasible at a high computational cost and time which makes it ineffective in any iterative design
Urban microclimate
process. By coupling physics-based simulations and statistical modelling techniques, this paper presents a
Surrogate modelling
Probabilistic modelling
probabilistic, progressive, and accuracy-adaptive modelling approach for faster spatially-resolved OTC estima­
tion that is scalable to large urban neighborhoods. This is achieved through three interrelated strategies: (1)
Throughout the different simulation stages, spatiotemporal OTC categories are displayed with successively rising
confidence levels to support instant design decision-making. (2) Confidence levels are based on probability
distributions of partially known environmental variables such as wind or mean radiant temperature. (3) Wind
distributions across an urban area are initially based on a spatially-informed set of rules and later replaced with
explicit simulations of wind flow fields. The approach is tested against state-of-the-art computational fluid dy­
namic simulations for a 3 km2 sample area of San Francisco’s financial district. Results show that scalable and
actionable predictions are achievable at all simulation stages with the percentage of misclassified hourly OTC
ranges during occupied hours falling from 36% for instant climate-based results to 8% and 7% for spatially
clustered wind and building aerodynamics informed predictions which take minutes to calculate for the inves­
tigated urban area. The building aerodynamics informed simulations accurately predicts diurnal and seasonal
OTC ranges for, on average, 97% of outdoor points.

1. Introduction
1.1. Motivation
Recent global urbanization patterns suggest that future growth will
primarily take place in cities, with an estimated two-third of the world’s
population already residing in urban areas [1]. This growth will place
additional pressures on cities to create and maintain liveable and
pleasant conditions for the larger population they will need to host and
cater for. Urban outdoor spaces play a significant role in the quality of
life, health and wellbeing of city dwellers as well as contribute greatly to
the city’s socio-economic vitality through accommodating daily pedes­
trian mobility as well as providing a venue for leisure, social and func­
tional activities [2,3]. The outdoor microclimate highly affects the
quality of those spaces as pedestrians may experience a large variation of
temperatures, solar exposures, wind speeds, and other climatic condi­
tions that are determined by the urban fabric. High correlations also
exist between the urban thermal environment and the usability of those
spaces [4–6]. Urban dwellers are equally strongly affected by climate
change, extreme weather conditions and urban heat island (UHI) im­
pacts. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the global mean air temperature increases by the end of the 21st
are projected to range from 1.4◦ to 4.4 ◦ C century across greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions scenarios [7], coupled with variations in solar radia­
tion and wind speeds. In addition to the increasing averages, more
intense and frequent temperature extremes and dangerous
heat-humidity conditions are projected to affect all regions [7]. With a
warming climate, health risks for urban populations are expected to
intensify ranging from thermal discomfort to heat stress, hospitalization
and even death [8,9]. These risks place uncertainties on the continued
usability of and comfort conditions in urban outdoor spaces in the
coming decades. An understanding of the current and potential future
urban microclimate is thus both essential to the design of high-quality
outdoor environments and fundamental to the long-term functioning

* Corresponding author. 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.

E-mail address: smokhtar@mit.edu (S. Mokhtar).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2023.110547
Received 27 March 2023; Received in revised form 15 June 2023; Accepted 17 June 2023
Available online 23 June 2023
0360-1323/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
and vitality of cities.
The outdoor urban thermal environment is affected by the combined
effect of macroclimatic factors including latitude, altitude, and season as
well as micro-climatic factors including urban geometry, vegetation,
and materials [10]. Heat-resilient urban design and planning strategies
can directly influence those micro-climatic factors to help mitigate heat
at the urban scale [10–13], with urban geometry and vegetation holding
the largest cooling potential [13]. While the addition of trees can sub­
stantially improve local thermal conditions through shading and
evapotranspiration, building-level interventions such as changes in
building dimensions, shape, orientation, and permeability naturally act
on a larger scale [13]. However, the extent to which urban form can be
altered in existing developments is often limited, and thus the integra­
tion of microclimate insights is necessary early in the planning and
design process. Insights from generic studies can guide design di­
rections, but results on the magnitude and extents of potential outdoor
thermal comfort improvements are not transferable across contexts and
climates [13] and thus require site-specific assessments. These assess­
ments can help inform planning and design decisions across scales: from
the building-level to the city scales. Enabled by such evidence-based
frameworks, the capacity to assess the feasibility and routing of active
mobility networks in existing cities, as well as quantifying the impact of
architectural and urban interventions on outdoor spaces become key to
maintaining comfortable, healthy, and liveable conditions in existing
neighbourhoods.
Design teams trying to accurately predict the urban microclimate
face two challenges: how to accurately describe diverse urban mor­
phologies, materiality and programming, and how to model the complex
physical phenomena that determine urban heat and mass flows. For a
seamless integration in early urban and architectural design and plan­
ning processes, modelling workflows should adapt to common charac­
teristics of the design process in practice including uncertainties in
problem formulation as well as rapid and frequent changes [14]. Current
microclimate modelling workflows can in principle simulate outdoor
thermal comfort (OTC) conditions accurately and at a high spatial and
temporal resolution. However, setting up and running the required
models requires expert knowledge and enormous computational re­
sources i.e., money and time, which renders them ineffective in any
iterative design process [15,16]. While some progress has been made
towards reducing the computational expense [17], computational fluid
dynamics (CFD) simulations remain one of the major bottlenecks and
thus dictate accuracy and error tolerances for outdoor thermal comfort
mapping workflows. Time-accuracy trade-offs are essential for their
usability in urban planning workflows, where the simulation time has to
match the turnaround time of specific design applications [18–20] for
actionable decision-making. While accelerated methods for urban wind
flow estimation have been extensively explored over the last few de­
cades with large variations in approaches, speed-up factors and resulting
accuracies, the suitability and uncertainty quantification for OTC
approximation have attracted less attention. Urban wind flow is only
one of its many components of OTC, and thus simulation resolution
requirements will vary across applications, scales, and climatic contexts.
1.2. Accelerated modelling approaches across disciplines
Various accelerated modelling approaches have been developed
across disciplines to strengthen the connection between design and
simulation, and offer relevant conceptual frameworks highly applicable
yet largely unexplored for microclimate assessments.
1.2.1. Probabilistic modelling: decision-making under uncertainty
While it is widely understood that predictive models are subject to
uncertainty with regards to inputs, models, and parameters [21], most
approaches employed in practice for urban and building performance
simulation workflows tend to be deterministic. The integration of un­
certainty and sensitivity analyses in building performance simulation
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Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
has attracted a lot of research attention in the past decade particularly to
account for specification and scenario uncertainties [22–27]. Modelling
uncertainty, which describes how a model will deviate from accurately
representing the system it attempts to model, however, has received less
attention in the context of design decision making as it is rarely a
parameter within a designer’s control. To account for imperfections of
low-order model simplifications used in estimation methods, estimating
model uncertainties can provide an opportunity to capture the impacts
on downstream performance tasks, as shown by Nevat et al. [28] in his
accounting of the impact of weather clustering on not only OTC esti­
mation but also how it affects the selection of a suitable mitigation
strategy.
1.2.2. Progressive modelling: intermediate actionable feedback
In contrast to typical computation workflows, where a full analysis
must be performed for any feedback, a progressive method enables the
inspection of a process’s partial results as they become available i.e., as
an algorithm progresses, as more data become accessible, and/or as
design parameters get refined. It provides the means to extract mean­
ingful intermediate feedback and gives the flexibility to selectively fine
tune performance accuracies as needed by specific applications. This
modelling concept was adopted in various fields: data science to
dynamically handle growing datasets [29,30], industrial engineering to
ensure systems’ flexibility and adaptability to change [31],
human-computer interaction to enable faster decision-making through
user interaction with intermediate visual outputs [32–34] and have been
fundamental to light propagation algorithms for rendering and
daylighting assessments [35–37].
1.2.3. Accuracy-adaptive modelling: selective abstraction and refinement
Adaptive refinement and abstraction of complex models is a well-
established concept across disciplines to control the trade-off between
model complexity and performance accuracy. The development of
adaptive spatial and numerical discretization for finite element
methods, for instance, is common for structural, thermal, aerodynamics
and other multi-physics applications [38,39]. Through selective refine­
ment, the computational complexity of simulations is reduced. Despite
their merits, adaptive methods that explicitly and directly control
abstraction levels tend to be less prevalent, particularly ones that
selectively act on individual model sub-components.
1.3. Contribution
Microclimate modelling workflows have undergone a lot of devel­
opment in recent years but are still far from practical integration into
design workflows. To date, most accelerated microclimate modelling
research focus on simplifying select OTC components through reducing
the spatial, temporal and/or geometric resolution of the respective
simulation [16,40–42]. However, these studies are constrained to
certain contexts and climates, or they focus on identifying errors in
estimating individual variables rather than considering whether
informed design decisions can be made without having to go through
fully resolved simulations. While a lot of research has focused on
reducing the computational expense of estimating wind flow [43,44],
faster and accessible solutions come at the cost of generalizability,
interpretability and confidence [44–46]. Having a methodology that is
accurate and fast is important but understanding performance vari­
ability and causality can be equally crucial, which is an aspect that is
often overlooked in current approaches. The understanding of a design
performance possibility space can often be more valuable than only
enabling the estimation of a single high-accuracy performance solution
when it comes to providing actionable design feedback. A combination
of speed, interpretability and complexity for estimation methods, as well
as the exploration of fit-for-purpose performance feedback informed by
uncertainties, remain important avenues that have been less examined
for microclimate assessments.
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Through coupling physics-based simulations and statistical model­
ling techniques, the paper presents a novel modelling approach for faster
spatially resolved OTC estimation that is scalable to large urban neigh­
bourhoods. The approach bridges the gap between the computationally
expensive but accurate physics-based simulations and surrogate
modelling techniques which can be fast, but which often lack robustness,
confidence, and interpretability It provides an application-based eval­
uation methodology that distinguishes between urban planning and
active mobility applications, while emphasizing how method simplifi­
cations affect downstream design insights and decision-making. This
work adopts a probabilistic, progressive, and accuracy-adaptive framework,
combining concepts developed across disciplines to streamline the
integration of simulation feedback in design and decision-making pro­
cesses. By leveraging application-specific accuracy and confidence re­
quirements as well as input significance variability across climates, non-
deterministic intermediate performance feedback informed by un­
certainties can enable decision-making at reduced computational and
modelling complexity. The proposed framework does not aspire to
compete with or replace high-accuracy CFD-based approaches, but
instead, it provides an alternative for smoother design integration
through targeting acceleration, scalability and interpretability of OTC
performance feedback for actionable decision-making.
2. Methodology
2.1. Probabilistic, progressive and accuracy-adaptive framework
The proposed framework for fast spatially-resolved OTC estimation
adopts a probabilistic methodology that integrates distributions of un­
certain parameters as simplifications for OTC evaluation and evaluates
the downstream impact on design decisions. This enables informed de­
cision making at substantially lower computational costs. It couples this
approach with a progressive and accuracy-adaptive methodology that
enables an incremental OTC evaluation associated with varying levels of
fidelity for model sub-components and their associated confidence
levels. This informs the suitability of respective accuracies for different
applications, and provides the flexibility of only accounting for model
complexity when and where it is needed.
Fig. 1. Probabilistic, progressive and accuracy-adaptive framework.
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Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
2.1.1. Workflow
This conceptual framework is translated into a five-stage workflow
illustrated in Fig. 1 and detailed in 2.2. To achieve a suitable predictive
accuracy for OTC at lower computational costs, deterministic simulation
inputs are substituted with distributions, confidence levels are used to
determine whether a higher fidelity approximation is required, and
layers of information and fidelity are incrementally added to the model
to achieve the desired level of confidence required for a specific appli­
cation. The method consists of five progressive stages: climate-file based
OTC, solar-radiation-based OTC, spatially aware wind-distribution-
based OTC, building-aerodynamics-informed wind-distribution-based
OTC and a fully resolved OTC combining solar radiation and CFD sim­
ulations used as the ground truth for validation.
2.1.2. Metric: Universal Thermal Climate Index
To spatially evaluate outdoor thermal comfort, the Universal Ther­
mal Climate Index UTCI ◦ C metric is used, which, similar to other OTC
metrics, has four main input variables: air temperature Tamb ◦ C, relative
humidity RH (%), mean radiant temperature MRT ◦ C and wind speed
WSp (m/s). The first two are mostly climate-dependent and thus the
focus in the assessment is on integrating the spatial modelling of MRT
and WSp. The equivalent temperature metric can then be categorized
into thermal stress bands that range from cold to heat stress, including a
“no thermal stress band” falling between 9 ◦ C and 26 ◦ C. The metric is
computed based on the original UTCI 6th order polynomial approxi­
mation [47] and MRT calculations are based on Kessling et al. [48] (refer
to Appendix A for implementation details and assumptions). A hybrid
modelling [16,17,49] approach is adopted, which in contrast to inte­
grated modelling, combines independently simulated variables to map
their collective impact, and thus provides the flexibility to replace time
and computationally expensive components with surrogate models,
faster computation, approximations, or simplifications.
2.1.3. Case study: San Francisco financial district
A case study area spanning 3 km2 of San Francisco’s financial district
is selected for calibration and validation of the workflow. A sub-zone
1.5 km-wide defines the pedestrian area of interest and is surrounded
by 0.225 km perimeter of context buildings to ensure a suitable
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
representation of wind flow. The richness of San Francisco’s urban fabric
with its characteristic diversity in building densities with a variation of
low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise buildings, urban morphologies and
topography suggests it can provide sufficient variability to assess the
merits and limitations of the proposed framework. The 3D model ge­
ometry is based on a simplified version of the shape file provided by the
City of San Francisco [50]. A flat topography replaced the original San
Francisco terrain height variations to isolate the impacts of urban form
on pedestrian level wind, which constitutes the primary focus of the
method. A total of over 100,000 pedestrian analysis points of interest
were defined as a subset of a 4×4m grid that is filtered to only account
for locations within pedestrian-accessible zones at a height of 1.5 m
above the ground as defined by industry standards for wind pedestrian
assessments [51,52].
2.2. Modelling stages
The five modelling stages developed involve gradually introducing
more refined and informed distributions of the mean radiant tempera­
ture and wind speed input parameters of the outdoor thermal comfort
metric.
2.2.1. Climate-based OTC
The initial stage involves getting an understanding of the potential
confidence in climate-based outdoor thermal comfort predictions that
are estimated in the absence of fully resolved solar radiation and wind
simulation results and any spatial awareness of the problem at hand. At
this stage, the distributions of diffuse solar radiation, sky view factor and
wind factor are defined as continuous uniform distributions and binary
for direct solar radiation. The span of these distributions is determined
to range from zero to the highest recorded value for a fully exposed
condition in the corresponding weather file for solar radiation, as well as
0.5 for view factor and 3 for wind factor respectively. Random sampling
of 1000 data points is performed on the cross-referenced combination of
these parameters and used to calculate possible UTCI values for each
hour.
2.2.2. Solar radiation-based OTC
The second stage incorporates results from fully resolved solar ra­
diation simulations and sky view factor calculations for the estimation of
mean radiant temperatures at every point of interest for every hour.
Direct and diffuse hourly solar irradiance values are simulated using the
DIVA-for-Rhino plugin [53], an environmental performance analysis
tool operating within the Rhino3D computer-aided design (CAD) envi­
ronment and based on the validated Radiance engine [54]. In the
Table 1
Geometric parameters for spatially informed wind distributions.
Geometric point-obstruction parameters for spatially aware
wind distribution-based OTC
dw distance to the closest windward obstruction (m)
hw height of the closest windward obstruction (m)
dl distance to the closest leeward obstruction (m)
hl height of the closest leeward obstruction (m)
dc distance of closest building corner (m)
hc height of closest building corner (m)
sw sky view factor windward defined as the fractions of the sky hemisphere lying within 45◦ from the wind
direction of interest
sl sky view factor leeward defined as the fractions of the sky hemisphere lying within 45◦ from the direction
opposite to the wind direction of interest
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Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
absence of material properties, all building surfaces are assumed to have
a 30% reflectance and 10% for the ground surface based on best-practice
daylight assessment recommendations [55]. A custom scripting
component is used to calculate the sky view factor based on ray-mesh
intersections between points of interest and a fine sky density of 580
equal patches based on Reinhart sky subdivision scheme [56] sampled at
a rate of 20 rays/patch. A sub-sample of 100 data points is extracted
from the continuous uniform wind factor distribution of equally likely
wind factors between 0 and 3 described in 2.2.1. This sample size is
equivalent in volume to dividing the 0 to 3 range to a fine 0.03 wind
factor interval for a uniform distribution. To maintain computational
feasibility while ensuring sufficient data points, the 100-sample size is
used throughout all other subsequent OTC calculation stages, and is
equivalent to more than 87 billion data points for an annual study (8760
h x 100,000 points × 100 wind factor samples). These are coupled with
the spatially resolved mean radiant temperature values to estimate
possible UTCI values for each hour and every point of interest.
2.2.3. Spatially aware wind distribution-based OTC
The third stage challenges the assumption of a uniform wind factor
distribution and adopts a spatially aware approach that captures the
impact of geometrical relationships relating each point of interest to its
neighbouring obstructions and wind direction to the likelihood of an
acceleration and deceleration to occur and at which intensity. A vast
body of building aerodynamics research supports and quantifies the
influence of urban form on wind flow and identifies main flow param­
eters as building dimensions (width, height), orientation (relative to
wind incidence), separation (distance to obstruction) as well as density
and configurations of obstructions [57,58]. For a large urban context of
San Francisco’s financial district for which wind factor values are
available from CFD simulations, a custom script was developed to
calculate for each point geometric relationships with the building ob­
structions that can quantitatively describe most flow parameters in a
computationally-efficient manner. These are defined and listed in the
left column of Table 1.
To identify distinct sets of geometrical relationships found in urban
contexts, K-means clustering, an unsupervised learning method aimed at
partitioning a set of observations in a pre-defined number of clusters, is
implemented on the parameters extracted for all points in the set. The
optimal number of clusters is identified by plotting the inertia and
silhouette scores across different cluster sizes and identifying the
optimal cluster using the elbow method for the inertia and the highest
silhouette score. Spatial mapping of clustered points and geometric
parameter distributions are used to verify and inspect the distinct urban
contexts. For each cluster, a best-fit probability density function is
Geometric building-obstruction parameters for building
aerodynamics-informed
wind distribution-based OTC
W building width, defined as the length of side facing the wind
direction (m)
D building depth, defined as the length of side aligned with
the wind direction (m)
Hm building maximum height (m)
Hc building height at corner (m)
θc angle perpendicular to corner with respect to wind direction
(degrees)
θ angle perpendicular to windward building side (degrees)
pc closest building separation distance to corner (m)
g separation distance to closest building upstream (m)
h height of closest building upstream (m)
z0 terrain roughness
Lgeo geometric influence scale
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

estimated for the corresponding wind factor values. The latter is then that is both in the wake of a high-rise as well as in the frontal vortex of
used to represent the likelihood of wind factor ranges for any point in an another building, the products of these individual effects were calibrated
urban context given its geometrical parameters by identifying the type against CFD simulations and weighing parameters were determined that
of urban context it belongs to and the corresponding estimated proba­ best fit those conditions. The proposed strategy is based on general
bility distributions. These replace the uniform distribution assumption dominance and interaction patterns, where the expectation is that
for UTCI likelihood calculations. higher impact zone magnitudes which typically occur closest to interest
areas, are most dominant, with a descending impact as distance and
2.2.4. Building aerodynamics-informed wind distribution-based OTC magnitude decrease. A decay exponential function y = f i with varying
The fourth stage further informs the wind distribution by integrating parameter f ∈ [0.01, 0.99], where i is the sorted index of impact zone
knowledge from building aerodynamics research that is targeted at split by acceleration a or deceleration d, is used to model this aggregate
developing simple quantitative relationships between building form and impact. The resulting wind factor for each point is calculated using the
pedestrian wind flow, particularly drawing on the work of Bottema [57] following equation (1):
and Reiter [58]. The exact prediction of average wind speeds in complex ∏n ( ( ) ) ∏n ( ( ))
urban environments cannot be achieved without expensive simulation WFact = i=0
fa i ai + 1 − fa i × i=0 fd i di + 1 − fd i (1)
workflows, but quantitative orders of magnitude predictions are and
The parameters a, d and f are respectively the sorted list of accel­
may, in many cases, be sufficient for identifying how design decisions
erations in descending order, decelerations in ascending order and the
affect wind flow impact zones [58]. Through developing a novel
decay exponential function parameter.
methodology to spatially implement form-wind relationships identified
in the literature, the wind distributions described in 2.2.3 are narrowed
2.2.4.3. Spatial implementation framework. To apply the form-flow re­
down to a primary range within the predicted wind factor quantified by
lationships form 2.2.4.1 and 2.2.4.2 to wind factor predictions for any
this method and its estimated mean error range. The proposed method
urban configuration, a custom script was developed to extract individual
involves four steps that are described in the following subsections.
building properties and building-to-nearest-building parameters and
Firstly, key quantitative relationships are identified between building
determine aggregate impact zones and factors for each analysis point of
form parameters including the height, width, length, orientation, etc.
interest. These are defined and listed in the right column of Table 1. As
and the zone and magnitude of key flow impact regions. Secondly, an
these parameters are functions of not just the building characteristics
aggregation strategy is developed to identify dominance and interaction
but its relationship with respect to the wind direction, they are repeat­
of overlapping flow impact zones. Thirdly, a script is developed to apply
edly calculated for the eight cardinal directions. Based on those pa­
these relationships to any outdoor point in any given urban configura­
rameters and the mathematical expressions defined in Appendix B, the
tion. Fourthly, the method is calibrated against a subset of fully resolved
shape and extents of wind impact zones are defined for each building
CFD simulation results and mean error ranges are considered for the
along with an associated magnitude based on rules defined in 2.2.4.1.
wind distribution integration and used to constrain the distribution
Each analysis point is then checked for containment within all impact
closer to its expected range.
zones resulting in a list of impact zones split by acceleration and
deceleration and sorted by magnitude for each point. Aggregation rules
2.2.4.1. Form and flow. The influence area and flow zones around a
defined in 2.2.4.2 are then used to calculate wind factor predictions for
building consist of mainly: a frontal vortex with recirculating flow in
each point and each wind direction for varying parameters fa and fd
front of a building, corner streams developing at the building corners
where f ∈ [0.01, 0.99].
and often considered to be the most important flow feature, a recircu­
lation zone developing behind the building with substantial wind speed
2.2.4.4. Decay rate calibration. To identify the calibrated decay pa­
reductions and finally the far wake defining the regions far away from
rameters for acceleration and deceleration, for each set of fa and fd , the
the building that are still affected and which can extend to up to 45 times
deviation of the aggregated wind factors for each as defined in 2.2.4.3
the building height. Other key interaction effects that are observed in
are compared against the corresponding outputs from CFD simulations
urban contexts are accelerations resulting from the double-corner effect
to identify the parameters most consistent with ground truth simulation
which occurs when two or more building corners are in proximity as
results. This is performed for an 80% subset of the 100,000 analysis
well as the downdraft effect which occurs when a small separation exist
points. The highest percentage of points associated with low errors is
between a high-rise building downstream of a lower building. A func­
used to identify the optimum parameters for the aggregation of flow
tional representation of the quantitative impacts (dimensions and
impact zones per point. The average error range is used to split the wind
magnitudes) of these wind effects is derived from building aerodynamics
distribution identified in 2.2.3 into a more likely range defined as the
research [57–59] for every zone type through piece-wise low-order
predicted wind factor WFactpred using the calibrated aggregation ±μerror
polynomial approximations fitted on data points, unless mathematical
and a less likely range representing the rest of the distribution. The
expressions are provided (see Appendix B for details). The approach
resulting distribution is derived from a weighing of the two parts by a
adopted for extrapolation beyond data points is to fit linearly edge
0.7 : 0.3 ratio, such that oversampling is achieved for the more likely
points instead of assuming particular trends. These relationships are
range. This defines the estimated factor as an indicator of a range of
used as indications of general wind flow patterns rather than absolute
potential acceleration/deceleration as opposed to an exact value.
values.

2.2.5. Fully resolved OTC

2.2.4.2. Dominance and interaction. Flow complexity increases at higher
To establish a reference model to compare the proposed approaches
densities and building heights. The resulting behaviour can be deter­
against, CFD simulation results for the eight cardinal directions replace
mined by buildings’ mutual sheltering impacts which largely dominate
the wind distribution models to accurately predict hourly UTCI for all
areas with low-rise building configurations, in addition to pressure short
points of interest. Industry standards for pedestrian wind flow estima­
circuiting and highest wind speeds dominance that commonly occur in
tion in urban environments were used for the selection of the simulation
high-rise building zones [57]. While these multi-building interactions
type and parameters [51,52,60]. Steady-state Reynolds-averaged
are documented for various typical urban configurations, they cannot be
Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with a realizable k-epsilon model were
directly used to quantitatively infer cumulative impacts resulting from
solved using the OpenFOAM solver [61] through Eddy3D [62]. A cy­
different urban configurations. To determine which flow impact zone
lindrical simulation domain was defined as a factor of the height of
dominates for points affected by several opposing effects, say a point
tallest building that is about 320 m high, with a refinement sub-region

5
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
reaching the smallest cell size of 1 m and further refinement in the
ground layer. A roughness length z0 of 1 m was used which corresponds
to a sub-urban environment to represent flow beyond the modelled
buildings. The convergence threshold was set as wind flow field re­
siduals falling below the recommended 10− 5 and computation was
enabled by MIT SuperCloud [63], a research cluster computing resource,
running for 5 days in parallel on 512 cores of a Linux distribution.
Simulated wind speeds across directions are then normalized to estimate
wind reduction factors that are then coupled with resolved MRT to es­
timate UTCI values per point and per hour.
Fig. 2. Wind factor spatial distribution for wind coming from the south and relationship to geometric parameters.
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Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
3. Results
3.1. Wind distribution estimation
3.1.1. Spatially aware wind distribution
Wind factor results were extracted from CFD simulations for all
points and related to geometric features through capturing the varying
distributions across equally spaced splits as shown in Fig. 2. Besides the
higher frequency of lower wind speeds visible in the plots, it is hard to
capture clear relationships between individual geometrical parameters
and wind factors, which acts as an additional motivation to clustering
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 3. Spatial distribution of urban clusters and corresponding wind factor distribution.
properties and capturing their interactions.
An 80% training split of the pedestrian points of interest were used to
identify distinct urban clusters based on their geometrical relationships
with the surrounding buildings and the sky, and the remaining 20%
were held-out for validation. By spatially assigning the clusters, plotting
their geometric parameter distributions and observing their properties,
three main clusters of points are visually distinct as shown in Fig. 3.
Cluster 0 ‘between high rises’ includes points that have a high obstruction
and corner height particularly windward, as well as low sky view fac­
tors, generally occurring close to high-rise buildings. Cluster 1 ‘open to
sky’ includes points that have a larger exposure to the sky, a high
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Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
windward sky view factor, moderate leeward factor and low obstruction
height. Cluster 2 ‘close to buildings’ represents points that are located
majorly close to buildings, are characteristic of low sky view factor and
obstruction height. The wind factor distribution across clusters reflects a
disproportionate split of points represented by each cluster, with most
points belonging to cluster 2. Decreasing probabilities of being associ­
ated with larger wind factors can be observed moving from cluster 0 to
2, with the highest probabilities occurring in the presence of high-rise
buildings and the lowest in dense low to mid-rise building settings.
Best-fit probability distribution functions were estimated based on
the normalized wind factor distributions for each cluster, resulting in
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
exponentiated Weibull and generalized inverse gaussian distributions
(see Appendix C for details).
3.1.2. Building aerodynamics-informed wind distribution
To identify the calibrated decay parameters for acceleration and
deceleration, for each set of fa and fd , the deviation of the aggregated
wind factors was compared against the corresponding outputs from CFD
simulations. The highest percentage of points associated with low errors
is used to identify the optimum parameters for the aggregation of flow
impact zones per point. The results indicate that an acceleration factor fa
of 0.01 and a deceleration factor fd of 0.77 result in the largest consis­
tency with CFD simulation results, for which the decay functions are
shown in Fig. 4. These indicate that the highest acceleration zone
generally dominates the flow, while for deceleration zones in contrast,
the impacts are rather cumulative and associated with a decaying
influence.
The absolute error in wind factor among all points is 0.38, and the
absolute error percentage quartiles are Q1, Q2, Q3 : 28%, 67%, 88%
across orientations. While the errors do not indicate that this simplified
method can in any capacity replace CFD simulations, it provides a faster
insight into the expected wind flow behaviour and potential results’
variation from ground truth which is used to further constrain the wind
distribution. Based on this error range, for each point wind factor pre­
diction, the wind distribution is split into two zones: the first one ranging
±0.3 from the predicted factor which contributes 70% to the final dis­
tribution and the other one represents the remaining wind factor range
accounting for 30% of the final distribution. This defines the estimated
factor as an indicator of a range of potential acceleration/deceleration as
opposed to an exact value.
To get an understanding of the method’s ability to capture wind flow
patterns, an analysis of the errors associated with the predictions are
spatially captured before the distribution split and sampling needed for
integration into UTCI calculations, in the upper portion of Fig. 5. Major
areas of acceleration and deceleration are generally identified by the
simplified model, particularly noticeable with the lowest wind factors on
the northern and north-western areas of the site. While higher wind
factors on the north-east facing the bay and closer to high-rise buildings
are captured, there is an underestimation of speed-ups in the south-west
zone that hosts at multiple locations one or a few high-rise buildings
surrounded by lower densities. Fig. 5 additionally shows enlarged views
highlighting the variations between predicted and simulated wind fac­
tors across various urban typologies (rows 1A to 1C – low-density and
building heights in 1A to high density and high-rise buildings in 1C) and
orientations with respect to wind direction (rows 1C–2C – south-east in
1C and east in 2C), as well as the relative percentage errors. The average
of wind factor distribution across the distinct areas 1A, 1B and 1C
associated with different urban densities and typologies are generally
consistent. For instance, wind factor values less than 0.75 dominate the
low-rise building zone 1A, while higher accelerations of 1.5 wind factor
Fig. 4. Calibration of aggregation decay function.
8
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
and higher are more dominant in 1B and 1C. These observations are
consistent and proportionally spatially represented across the simulated
and predicted views. Inconsistencies between simulated and predicted
wind factor values are highest in areas surrounding buildings with
distinct forms. The impact zones of corner streams and frontal vortex in
high-rise building locations in 1B and 1C are identified but are associ­
ated with a general over-estimation of magnitude. Wind factor estimates
for the same region across different orientations (1C and 2C) highlight
the ability of the model to clearly differentiate the wind angles of inci­
dence and their influence on both the impact zones and magnitudes.
The wind factor estimates, which are used to constrain the likelihood
of wind to accelerate or decelerate, are computed within 20min for the
full site, less than a minute for 500 m2 parts, compared to a month worth
of CFD simulations. The targeted insight from this work is in capturing
general wind trends and quantifying their potential contribution to OTC
assessments and do not aspire to provide the necessary accuracy for
wind safety and danger assessments. Visual inspection of results indicate
that general trends are captured across urban densities and typologies,
and thus can be used to narrow down possibilities within the wind factor
distribution used for OTC calculations.
3.2. Progressive outdoor thermal comfort estimation
The conceptual formulation of the method is built on the hypothesis
that in lieu of performing complex simulations, assigning probability
distribution functions to describe uncertainties associated with the
estimation of certain parameters, makes informed decision possible at
substantially lower computational costs. While the UTCI metric is a
continuous parameter that represents the felt-like temperature by ac­
counting for the combined radiative and wind effects, from the
perspective of a designer or decision maker, temperature-degree varia­
tions do not necessarily imply impact significance. It then becomes more
actionable to express UTCI in terms of its comfort bands, ignoring
within-bands variations, as well as capping these at the thresholds of
strong stress beyond which the associated health risks become sub­
stantial enough to equally necessitate immediate attention for adapta­
tion and mitigation action. For these reasons, further methods’
evaluations represent UTCI in 7 bands: strong, moderate and slight heat
and cold stress as well as comfort. To evaluate the suitability of the
progressive method for outdoor thermal comfort estimation on down­
stream design decisions, an evaluation of hourly and seasonal pre­
dictions is carried out for all pedestrian analysis points of interest.
3.2.1. Hourly UTCI
As predictions from the UTCI estimation stages are the outcome of
sampling one or two distributions rather than unique values, they are
visually represented as pie charts indicating the potential comfort bands
and their likelihood of occurrence. Fig. 6 shows the zoom-in assessment
area used to spatially assess the implications of estimation methods. This
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

Fig. 5. Wind factor estimates against CFD simulation results - Enlargements across the site.

9
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 6. UTCI predictions across methods for July 15th noon. Zoom-in assessment area.
visualization strategy provides the means to observe varying degrees of
assessment granularity. If the target is capturing a global understanding
of comfort patterns, on a zoom-out visual, only conditions that are most
likely to occur are visible. As the assessment area becomes more defined,
likelihood pie charts become more visible uncovering comfort condition
uncertainties.
As the method progresses from stage 1–5, the reduced uncertainty in
the possible value ranges of mean radiant temperature and wind speeds
10
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
and its impact on outdoor thermal comfort is shown in Fig. 6 for a
sample summer daylight hour: July 15th at noon. Confidence is defined
as the likelihood of occurrence based on assigned probability distribu­
tions. In the top row results are shown for all sensor points independent
of confidence rate, leading to a colour gradient across the site. In the
bottom row, an alternative visualization scheme is shown in which only
point with a confidence of at least 80% are displayed. The latter display
mode provides insight into the areas where higher resolution models
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 7. Variations between UTCI estimates across stages and corresponding CFD-based for all data points and hours.
would be advantageous.
The difference in majority vote UTCI predictions across stages
compared to CFD-based UTCI estimates were calculated for all data
points and hours as shown in Fig. 7. The predictions were categorized
into UTCI comfort bands with box plots indicating the percentage dif­
ference in hours that fall within each category for all data points be­
tween each stage and their corresponding values in CFD-based
simulation outputs. Consistent decline in the difference in hours per­
centage is clear across comfort and cold comfort categories with a sub­
stantial improvement achieved by integrating some level of wind
knowledge in the prediction. For hot stress categories, the average hours
percentage difference is generally consistent, but the distribution across
points narrows down as methods become more granular. In stronger
heat stress conditions, where mean radiant temperatures play a more
substantial role in the comfort prediction than wind condition, the value
of more informed wind distributions declines substantially when
compared to conditions on the other side of the cold comfort spectrum.
3.2.2. Diurnal and seasonal UTCI
Design decisions and policies are rarely based on point-in-time pre­
dictions but rather an understanding of possibilities and likelihoods of
occurrence resolved spatially across areas of interest within certain
timeframes. An understanding of the implications associated with
certain method simplifications can thus have a stronger correlation with
such aggregations. Fig. 8 shows the proportion of points within each
comfort band across times of day and seasons for the different UTCI
stage estimations. The charts reflect the most likely comfort condition
associated with select times of day and seasons rather than one specific
day.
The distribution of points across each comfort band starts with one
prediction for all points for the climate-based estimation approach, and
as more refined spatially and temporally resolved distributions are
introduced, a larger consistency is observed with CFD-based simulation
results. The integration of spatially informed wind distributions clearly
outperforms the reliance on mean radiant temperatures without wind
knowledge. The largest variations between predictions of wind distri­
bution methods are observed in early mornings, evenings and night as
well as during colder seasons of the year, where the impact of solar
radiation is smaller on outdoor thermal comfort.
Fig. 9 shows an enlarged view of the predictions across methods for
11
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
points exposed to different levels of solar and sky exposure for different
hours of day and seasons for three points A, B and C under different
exposure conditions. The pie charts represent the proportion of hours
that are associated with the seven comfort bands for each subset hours of
day aggregated for all days in the indicated season. The closer the
comfort band proportions across UTCI method stages are to the ground
truth CFD simulated results (shown in the last column), the higher the
consistency in OTC insights and feedback. A strong agreement can be
observed between wind-informed distribution methods (columns 3 and
4) and the CFD-based results, with matching comfort band proportion
predictions for more than 96% of the hours on average. Integrating
building aerodynamics knowledge in the wind distribution (column 4)
as well seems to noticeably improve the comfort proportions splits for
most data points across different times of the year from 87 to 96%. The
latter holds more consistently true for points located in areas that have a
high exposure to the sun and the sky (points A and C), and in times of the
year and day associated with higher degrees of solar radiation (spring
and summer morning and afternoons).
3.2.3. Climatic variations and OTC sensitivities
To explore the sensitivity and validity of observations beyond San
Francisco’s warm and temperate climate, a similar study was performed
applying the same methodology for two other contrasting climates: New
York, a humid subtropical climate with cold winters and hot moist
summers, and Singapore, a consistently hot and humid climate. A global
variance-based Sobol sensitivity study was carried out to identify the
varying dependence of UTCI on its four climatic parameters, and how
that varies across the three climates. Fig. 10 shows the first and second
order sensitivity indices (S1 and S2) which represent the contribution to
the output variance due to changes in each parameter in isolation and
accounting for two-way interactions. There are general trends across the
three with a clear dominance of air temperature followed by either MRT
or wind speed interchangeably and finally relative humidity. Variations,
however, are significant across and they include a higher contribution of
relative humidity (3.4% in contrast to <0.4% for New York and San
Francisco) and lower contribution of wind speed (14.3% in contrast to
17.9% for San Francisco) to UTCI in Singapore as well as a lower
dependence of UTCI on urban-dependent parameters (MRT/WSp) in
New York (67.4% air temperature contribution in contrast to <50% for
Singapore and San Francisco) due to the larger dominance of air
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 8. Proportion of points within each comfort band for across times of day and seasons for UTCI stages.
temperature.
This variation in rank and significance of parameter dominance for
UTCI across the three climate infers that the relative importance and
necessity of the OTC stages will vary. Fig. 11 is an enlarged view of the
predictions across methods for the Spring afternoon across the three
climates. In a hot and humid climate as Singapore, the climate-based
OTC is already about 85% consistent on average across points with
the expected comfort conditions, and while accuracy can be improved
with an overlay of solar and wind exposure information, there is a clear
and steep decay in the incremental benefit. In New York, the solar and
wind contributions show similar contributions to an accurate under­
standing of comfort conditions likelihoods, but a spatially aware wind
distribution, in this case, seems sufficient (about 95% consistent on
average across points) with no additional benefit to capturing and
integrating more detailed wind flow patterns. While those observations
are specific to this selected analysis period, they show that increased
modelling fidelity, which is almost always associated with a time and
computational expense, is not always justifiable. This further highlights
the need for more flexible and fit-for-purpose OTC modelling ap­
proaches across design conditions, and justifies the progressive
approach adopted by the presented method.
12
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
4. Discussion
4.1. Acceleration and scalability
The prohibitive computational expense of numerically modelling
microclimate phenomena has limited the adoption of such frameworks
in design and policy workflows as well as their scalability to neigh­
bourhood and city-scale assessments. Addressing the acceleration and
scalability of such workflows has therefore been a key research direction
in this field, extending beyond traditional methods often through
numeric methods that can take advantage of parallel, cloud and/or
cluster computing, or statistical methods that bypass the need for
resolving physics rules and that can range in complexity and trans­
parency from regression to deep learning models. The numeric ap­
proaches remain time-demanding, resource-intensive, highly technical
and complex. The deep learning approaches applied to urban modelling
remain constrained to fixed-size domains, lack rigorous validation, and
largely limited in interpretability. The simpler statistical approaches
remain limited in scale to individual buildings up to blocks, as well as
limited in representation potential that hinder their usability for more
diverse frameworks than the ones they were derived from. The method
proposed in this paper bridges some of the remaining gaps in such ap­
proaches through enabling acceleration by scaling up interpretable
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 9. Variations in UTCI predictions throughout the day and across seasons across assessment stages.
statistical models to larger domains as well as quantifying their associ­
ated uncertainties for downstream applications. The presented
approach, additionally, provides control over the time-accuracy trade-
off based on desired confidence rates. Stage 1 climate-based instant
feedback up to 30% of hourly UTCI comfort band predictions are dis­
placed on average. That number drops to 7% for stage 4 wind
distribution-informed predictions which take minutes as opposed to
months to generate. For predictions of diurnal and seasonal UTCI
13
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
comfort patterns 93% of points were classified correctly across seasons
with results for summer conditions reaching an impressive 97%. In other
words, the proposed method offers a fast and reliable means to predict
seasonal and diurnal UTC conditions across urban environments. As the
computational approach to integrating wind information is based on
capturing geometrical relationships connecting points to obstructing
buildings, the computational and time expense of the workflow are
controllable variables, in contrast to traditional approaches that resolve
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

Fig. 10. Sensitivity analysis of climate parameters to UTCI for San Francisco, New York and Singapore.

Fig. 11. Variations in UTCI predictions across climates.

entire flow domains regardless of the size of the interest area. By pro­
gressively sampling from distributions, it is additionally possible to
visualize intermediate performance feedback, cutting down the time
needed for capturing potentially incomplete but insightful OTC results.
4.2. Interpretability and actionability
Across disciplines in the last decade, deep learning approaches have
outperformed other statistical approaches in terms of accuracy-time
trade-offs due to their ability to represent highly dimensional non-
linear and complex phenomena [44]. Their limited interpretability
has, however, constrained their wider applicability particularly in
physics modelling applications due to concerns over transparency and
generalizability [44–46]. Gaining an understanding of the underlying
rules defining a predictive system and its decision process, the causal
relationships connecting parameters and performance and the

14
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
Fig. 12. Relative contribution of buildings to wind factor.
actionability of such insights are two aspects that are essential to
establishing confidence and expanding impact. The first provides the
means to question, calibrate and synthesize the model while the second
uncovers performance sensitivities to variations in parameters defining
design and policy decisions. The presented method for faster and scal­
able outdoor thermal comfort predictions, thus, favours interpretability
and actionability over absolute accuracy. By backtracking all parame­
ters used to define building aerodynamics-informed wind distributions,
it is possible, using this method, to recover, for each analysis point, the
relevant impact zones, their type, their associated buildings and corre­
sponding geometric parameters, as exemplified in Fig. 12. Not only does
this allow for the identification of the relative contributions of built
environment elements towards the magnitude of acceleration or decel­
eration, but it also brings to light the mechanics behind the prediction
and can be evaluated for suitability in a particular context.
The downstream applications for outdoor thermal comfort modelling
vary considerably in scale and can range from project impact assess­
ments, performance-informed design, performance-based zoning, risk
and opportunity mapping to active mobility network assessments. The
scale of influence, type and horizon of decisions, intensity, duration and
significance of exposures vary considerably as they are dependent on
space usage activity patterns and times, as well as the populations
affected and their sensitivities. To capture the impacts variations,
isolating public outdoor spaces such as parks and gardens, and pedes­
trian walkways from the overall assessment of OTC predictions as an
example, provides an understanding of the key differences in assessment
methods’ requirements. For respective peak hours of use of each space
typology, uncertainties in OTC predictions range from an average of
15
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
3.5% of misclassified points for public outdoor space usage that typically
occurs midday in shoulder and summer seasons to 7.5% for active
mobility that typically occurs early morning and early evenings all year
long. The different types of decisions are also associated with varying
degrees of confidence requirements, which advocates again for fit-for-
purpose workflows, such as the one presented, that utilize complexity
only when and where it is necessary. This ability to quickly and confi­
dently assess OTC impacts associated with constantly evolving and
changing urban and architectural conditions is crucial for informed
decision making. In contrast to typical workflows that can take hours
and days for any feedback, design applications such as building massing
design, active mobility infrastructure design, public green space allo­
cation, etc. require an agile approach, such as the presented method,
that enables quicker and reliable feedback while maintaining control
over associated uncertainty levels and their suitability.
4.3. Limitations
By coupling physics-based simulations and statistical modelling
techniques, the paper presents a novel, fast and scalable modelling
approach to outdoor thermal comfort estimation. There are, however,
several limitations with respect to the general applicability of the
approach. Firstly, the geometric representation fidelity of urban envi­
ronments does not entirely encompass the formal complexities that exist
in highly dense cities around the world. This is reflected in the adopted
building aerodynamics statistical relationships which do not directly
account for building shape, lift-up conditions and topography, as well as
do not account for all possible flow interaction effects. The clustering of
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart
spatially-aware wind distributions is based on the 3 km2 model of San
Francisco’s financial district, which – while substantially diverse in
terms of urban morphology – cannot account for the urban diversity
across all cities. While this is a simplification of urban microclimate
complexities, the proposed method exemplified a workflow that can
continuously be augmented with more representative statistical re­
lationships and urban contexts that are higher in fidelity to both flow
and geometry complexities. Secondly, the method used to compute the
universal thermal climate index adopted some simplifications as a trade-
off for computational expense. The estimation is based on a hybrid
modelling approach that combined independently simulated variables
and thus does not account for thermal and wind flow interactions.
Buoyancy-driven wind flow was neglected for computational efficiency,
and is expected to only dominates wind flow patterns when speeds are
below 2 m/s [64]. In the absence of urban materials information, surface
temperatures were assumed to be a factor of the ambient temperature
and direct incident radiation, rather than estimates from detailed
modelling of building thermal flows. The macro-level implications of the
heat island effect are also not captured, so air temperatures utilized in
the assessments do not account for the impacts of urban geometry,
materiality and anthropogenic gains on urban air temperature. The
proposed workflow could easily be extended to account for such im­
pacts. Thirdly, widely adopted thermal comfort metrics, including UTCI
which is used in this study, describe outdoor thermal comfort as a factor
of only environmental parameters. This limits the metric’s ability to
directly account for the other factors known to affect thermal perception
including individual factors such as thermal history, heat acclimatisa­
tion, activity type, thermal preferences as well as demographic vulner­
ability parameters including age and underlying physical conditions.
While not explicitly considered in this work, the presented approach is
not metric-centric, can extend to other comfort metrics, as well as adopt
adjusted comfort bands determined by variabilities in thermal percep­
tion across the globe.
5. Conclusion
Through the development and evaluation of a novel outdoor thermal
comfort estimation workflow, this work addressed the challenge of
integrating microclimate insights into the design process through tar­
geting the acceleration, scalability and interpretability of OTC perfor­
mance feedback for actionable decision-making. Through a
probabilistic, progressive and accuracy-adaptive approach to outdoor
thermal comfort modelling, the paper findings show that scalable and
actionable predictions are achievable at varying ranges of accuracy-time
trade-offs. The integration of climate knowledge alone, for instance,
provided consistent predictions for about 70% of all points and hours.
Integrating spatially informed wind distributions for OTC evaluation
was shown to substantially increase this to 93% in minutes of
Appendices.
Appendix A: UTCI calculations and assumptions
The metric is computed based on the original UTCI 6th order polynomial approximation from the four parameters: Tamb (◦ C), RH (%), MRT (◦ C)
and WSp (m/s) at 10 m above ground [47]. MRT calculations are based on Kessling et al. [48] and can be expressed as an aggregation of long-wave,
short-wave direct and diffuse contributions to total MRT.
[ ]1
MRT = MRTdir 4 + MRTdiff 4 + MRTlw 4 4
MRTlw is calculated from the long-wave radiation of surrounding surfaces: in this case the sky and the context buildings at respective temperature T
and emission coefficient ε weighted by view factor f. Emission coefficients of both sky and building surfaces εsky,ctxt are assumed to be 0.95. Tsky is
calculated as a function of the ambient temperature Tamb and the dew point temperature Tdew at ground level, and Tctxt is assumed to be equal to the
ambient temperature Tamb with a deviation proportional to changes in direct incident radiation up to +20 ◦ C for 1000 Wh/m2 .
( [ ( ) ] )1
MRTlw = εsky,ctxt fsky ⋅Tsky 4 + 1 − fsky Tctxt 4 4
16
Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547
computation as opposed to months for the equivalent fully-resolved
simulated results. This, in contrast to other accelerated microclimate
modelling approaches, is achieved through transparent, analytical and
statistical strategies that enable enhanced interpretability through
exposing the prediction mechanics, confidence levels and possibility
space. This was primarily achieved through: (1) adopting a replacement
strategy for unknown parameters with their corresponding probability
distributions, (2) developing a spatially-informed workflow for
capturing wind distributions, (3) capturing and visualizing confidence
levels, uncertainties, comfort category possibility space across stages as
a tool for design and decision-making, and (4) focusing the method
evaluation on its interpretability and actionability rather than accuracy
alone. While the approach focused primarily on OTC estimation, the
concepts and methods are extendable to a larger range of applications
that are dependent on urban microclimate interactions and can
accommodate larger error tolerances. There is still a place for high-
fidelity computationally intensive physics simulations for microcli­
mate assessments in a wide range of applications that address issues of
safety and danger. These do not constitute the focus of this work which
adopts and promotes a fit-for-purpose approach that defines confidence
levels as a guiding factor for the selection of appropriate degrees of
problem abstraction. Finding, representing and accommodating for the
right level of abstraction at a minimal information loss for a given per­
formance simulation problem remains a challenging and open problem.
Further research should address investigations into associations be­
tween representation and performance and finding an application-
specific balance of fidelity and efficiency for accessible and impactful
assessments at scale.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Sarah Mokhtar: Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology,
Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization, Data curation,
Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Christoph Rein­
hart: Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
All data sources used to carry out this research come from open-
source data platforms and are clearly stated within the manuscript
including the SF GIS buildings model and the weather data file.
(A.1)
(A.2)
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

MRTdir is calculated based on the direct normal radiation I, the projected area factor fp dependent on the sun elevation [65], the short-wave
absorption coefficient as assumed as 0.7, the effective radiation area factor ea assumed as 0.725, the emission coefficient of clothing εp assumed as
0.95 and the Stefan-Boltzmann-constant σ.
[ ]1
I 4
MRTdir = fp ⋅as ⋅ea ⋅ (A.3)
εp ⋅σ
MRTdiff is calculated based on the short-wave diffuse radiation D from the sky and the reflected radiation from the ground. The ground to sky factors
fd and fi assumed as 0.5 and the ground reflectance rg assumed as 0.2.
[ ]1
[ ] as 4
MRTdiff = fd ⋅D + fi ⋅rg ⋅(D + I) ⋅ (A.4)
εp ⋅σ
The wind speed input to the UTCI is calculated based on the hourly wind speed in weather file WSpepw at height zepw typically 10 m, the terrain
roughness δurb , the pedestrian height zped set as 1.5 m, the required reference roughness δUTCI = 0.01 and height zUTCI = 1.1m for the UTCI input. The
last parameter is the wind factor WFact representing the ratio between the wind speed at the pedestrian height and the wind speed at the same height
without the presence of buildings. It is representative of the acceleration/deceleration effect of the wind around buildings.
z +δ z +δ
ln pedδ urb ln epwδ0.010.01
WSp10m,0.01 = WSpepw ⋅ zepw urb
+δurb
⋅WFact⋅ zped +δ (A.5)
ln δurb ln δ0.010.01

Appendix B: Polynomial approximations of wind flow to form relationships

Functional representation of the quantitative impacts (dimensions and magnitudes) of wind flow effects is derived from building aerodynamics
research [57–59] for every zone type (corner stream, recirculation zone, frontal vortex, far wake) as well as the embedded accounting of the
double-corner and downdraft effect. The fitted functions are detailed below and are a function of the following geometrical parameters:
W building width, defined as the length of side facing the wind direction (m).
D building depth, defined as the length of side aligned with the wind direction (m).
Hm building maximum height (m).
Hc building height at corner (m).
θc angle perpendicular to corner with respect to wind direction (degrees).
θ angle perpendicular to windward building side (degrees).
pc closest building separation distance to corner (m).
g separation distance to closest building upstream (m).
h height of closest building upstream (m).
z0 terrain roughness
Lgeo geometric influence scale

B.1 Corner stream

Length of corner stream:
⎧
⎪ W
⎪
⎪ 2.3W, < 0.2
⎪
⎪ H
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ W
⎪
⎨ 1.4H, > 3.25
Lcorner = ⎛ ⎞ ⎛
H
⎞ (B.1.1)
⎪
⎪ W W
⎪
⎪ − 0.2 − 0.2
⎪
⎪ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎟
⎪
⎪ 1.4H⋅⎝ H ⎠ + 2.3W⋅⎝1 − H ⎠, else
⎪
⎪ 3.05 3.05
⎩

Lcorner is derived by constructing relationships based on Fig. 4.11 of [57].

Factor of corner stream

⃒ ⃒
Fcorner = ⃒Uf ⋅Fc ⋅Fl ⋅Fa ⋅Fd ⃒ (B.1.2)
{
1.455⋅10− 7 Hc 3 − 9.09647⋅10− 5 Hc 2 + 2.35304129⋅10− 2 Hc + 1.1181686196, Hc < 96
Uf = (B.1.3)
5.83333⋅10− 2 Hc + 2.19, else
⎧ ( )3 ( )2 ( )
⎪
⎪ D D D D
⎪
⎪ 0.005 − 0.03 + 0.065 + 1, ≤3
⎨ 50 50 50 50
Fl = ( ) (B.1.4)
⎪
⎪ D
⎪
⎪ 0.01 + 1.03, else
⎩
50

17
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

⎧ ( )2 ( )
⎪
⎪ p p p
⎪
⎪ 10.739 − 0.7732 + 0.9107, ≤ 0.16
⎪
⎪ Hc H c H c
⎨
( )
Fc = p p (B.1.5)
⎪ 0.0966
⎪ + 1.0464, 0.16 < ≤ 0.5
⎪
⎪ Hc Hc
⎪
⎪
⎩
1, else
⎧ ( )
⎨ 0.3 log Hc + 1.6,
⎪
g < 2.4h and
h
≤ 0.8
Fd = W Hc (B.1.6)
⎪
⎩
1, else

Fa = 0.0082θc + 0.98 (B.1.7)

Fl , Fc , Fd , Fa are respectively correction factors accounting for building length, double-corner effect, incidence angle and downdraft impact.
Uf , Fl , Fc , Fd , Fa are derived from fitting low-order polynomial functions on data points recorded in respectively Figs. 5 and 9 of [58], Table 5 of [58],
Fig. 10 of [58,59] and Fig. 4.12 of [57].

B.2 Far wake

Length and factor for far wake

Lwake = |Lw ⋅Fw ⋅Fr ⋅Fa | (B.2.1)
⎧ ( )
⎪
⎨ 1.2, W
log >1
Fw = H (B.2.2)
⎪
⎩ W
e0.8 logHm − 1 , else
⎧
⎨ 1, θ < 20
Fa = 90 − θ (B.2.3)
⎩ , else
75
⎧ ( )
⎪
⎪ H
⎪
⎪ 1, log >1.5
⎪
⎪ z0
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎨ ( )
H
Fr = 0, log <0.5 (B.2.4)
⎪
⎪ z0
⎪ ( )
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ log H − 0.5,
⎪
⎪ else
⎩
z0

Lwake and Fwake are derived by constructing relationships based on Figs. 4.13 and 4.14 of [57].
The dimensions and corresponding impact factors of the wake as it gradually develops behind the building are defined through three parameters:
LwL its length as well as the length and width of a reference intermediate guiding location LwrL and LwrW , used to capture the wake’s lateral extension.
The parameters are defined for four corresponding far wake impact reduction factors Fwake .
Fwake 0.70 0.80 0.90 0.95
LwL 14H 18H 32H 46H
(B.2.5)
LwrL 10H 13H 25H 35H
LwrW 1.8H 2.4H 3.4H 4.5H

B.3 Frontal vortex

Length of frontal vortex

⃒ ⃒
LfrontalV = ⃒Lf ⋅Lgeo ⃒ (B.3.1)

W
Lgeo = W
(B.3.2)
1 + 2H
⎧
⎪
⎪ W W
⎪
⎪ 0.75 , < 0.8
⎪
⎨ H H
Lf = W W (B.3.3)
⎪
⎪ 0.2727 + 0.3818, 0.8 < <3
⎪
⎪ H H
⎪
⎩
1.2, else

Lgeo is based on equation 4.8 [57]. LfrontalV is derived by constructing relationships based on Fig. 4.9 [57].

Factor of frontal vortex

18
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

⃒ ⃒
Fcorner = ⃒Ufr ⋅Fd ⃒ (B.3.4)
⎧
⎨ − 2.1701⋅10− 6 H 3 + 4.642⋅10− 4 H 2 − 5.50595⋅10− 3 H + 1.47619⋅10− 3 , H ≤ 72
Ufr = 6.7⋅10− 3 H + 0.72, 72 < H ≤ 96 (B.3.5)
⎩
4.8⋅10− 3 H + 1.584, else
⎧ ( )
⎨ 0.3 log Hc + 1.6,
⎪
g < 2.4h and
h
≤ 0.8
Fd = W Hc (B.3.6)
⎪
⎩
1, else

Ufr and Fd are derived from fitting low-order polynomial functions on data points recorded in respectively Fig. 7 of [58], and Ref. [59].

B.4 Recirculation zone

Length of recirculation zone

⃒( ( ) ) ⃒
Lrecirc = ⃒ 4⋅Lgeo ⋅Fr + Fd ⋅Fa ⃒ (B.4.1)
⎧
⎪
⎪ H
⎨ 1,
⎪
z0
> 1000
Fr = ( ) (B.4.2)
⎪
⎪ 1 H
⎪
⎩ 1− − 1000 , else
4500 z0
⎧
⎨ 0, D D
< 1 and <1
Fd = H W (B.4.3)
⎩
1, else

(θ%45)
Fa = 1 − (B.4.4)
90

Factor of recirculation zone

⎧
⎨ 0.6, W
>3
Frecirc = H (B.4.5)
⎩
0.4, else

Fr , Fd , Fa and Frecirc are derived from relationships described in Ref. [57].

Appendix C: Clustering features, properties and associated best-fit probability distributions

The k-means clustering was based on the following geometrical parameters linking points to their surrounding obstructions relative to wind
directions.
dw distance to closest obstruction windward (m).
hw height of closest obstruction windward (m).
dl distance to closest obstruction leeward (m).
hl height of closest obstruction leeward (m).
fw sky view factor windward
fl sky view factor leeward
dc distance to closest corner (m).
hc height of closest corner (m).
The three geometrically distinct clusters identified cluster 0 ‘between high rises’, cluster 1 ‘open to sky’ and cluster 2 ‘close to buildings’ have the
following statistical parameters across geometric features in Table C.1.

Table C.1
Statistical parameters of geometric features across clusters

Cluster 0 Cluster 1 Cluster 2

mean std mean std mean std

dw 29.84 31.81 20.68 20.65 9.56 9.03

hw 17.34 15.41 133.22 37.72 28.33 17.46
dl 23.25 29.04 22.92 27.48 12.53 13.61
hl 27.58 36.05 80.92 60.65 36.33 35.74
fw 0.21 0.051 0.078 0.05 0.08 0.04
fl 0.16 0.081 0.097 0.07 0.10 0.06
dc 21.41 20.48 23.47 19.17 19.98 29.78
hc 22.07 30.17 91.14 64.38 32.53 32.34

In order to assign new observations to the developed clusters, the deviation of the feature parameters from their respective mean in each cluster can

19
S. Mokhtar and C. Reinhart Building and Environment 242 (2023) 110547

be calculated, and the cluster associated with the lowest combined difference can be assigned. It is important to note, however, that the data points
used for this clustering are specific to the financial district in San Francisco model, and, while diverse in morphology, may not be sufficiently
representative for any urban area worldwide. The same clustering procedure can be replicated for additional or context-specific data points for more
diverse conditions.
Best-fit probability distribution functions were estimated based on normalized distributions for wind factor values across all points within each
cluster. This results in the following exponentiated Weibull and generalized inverse gaussian distributions.

Cluster 0 : f (x; a, c, s) = s⋅ac[1 − e− c ]a− 1 e− c xc− 1

(C.1)

where a = 1.68, c = 1.06, s = 0.36.

− b(x+1x)
xp− 1 e 2
Cluster 1 : (x; p, b, s, l) = s⋅ √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ +l (C.2)
2 2xπ e− x

where p = 1.42, b = 0.25, s = 0.05, l = 0.

− b(x+1x)
xp− 1 e 2
Cluster 2 : (x; p, b, s, l) = s⋅ √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅ ̅ +l (C.3)
2 2xπ e− x

where p = 1.22, b = 0.39, s = 0.07, l = − 0.01.

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