System Analysis of Mesoscale and Microscale Urban Climate Simulation Workflows

Abstract

The Cooling Singapore project studies the urban climate of Singapore and, in particular, evaluates measures to mitigate urban heat. For this purpose, Cooling Singapore utilises a variety of tools for modelling, simulation, data processing and analysis. Some of these tools are off-the-shelf software (e.g., MATLAB, ANSYS Fluent), while others are third-party open-source software modified to meet the needs of the project (e.g., WRF), or software that has been developed in-house specifically for the purpose of the project. The resulting ecosystem of tools is thus highly diverse, requiring a diverse set of skills and operating environments in order to perform integrated studies across multiple domains. At the moment, such integrated studies are carried out in a collaborative manner involving the contributions from various researchers. The ability to carry out integrated what-if scenario analysis is important to investigate the potential impact of mitigation measures on the urban climate. This ability is not only important for researchers but also for practitioners, such as urban planning authorities for example. Manual workflow execution, involving the contributions of several researchers, represents a significant constraint. Not only is this process time-consuming, it is also prone to human error. A better approach would be to clearly specify the individual steps needed to carry out a particular what-if scenario analysis and automate (as far as possible) the entire process. This would not only reduce the amount of manual work (thus freeing researchers’ time to focus on other things) but also vastly improve the reproducibility of results and reduce the likelihood of human error. The first steps towards automated workflow execution are to analyse the workflows to better understand the various steps that are needed in order to carry out integrated studies and what-if scenario analyses. This document represents a systematic analysis of the primary workflows and their principal components in the context of the Cooling Singapore project. In particular, this document provides an overview of all principal components, as well as their input and output data. The information provided in this document is not meant to be a detailed documentation for each of the various model components. Instead, it is a system-level analysis that focuses on the flow of data from one model to another. It should also be noted that the information provided here is valid as of the time of writing. However, as the project evolves, so will the workflows and the components of the system.