Sofia-Mujica

[sofia-mujica]

February 3, 2024 Attached are initial notes from various papers covering current microclimate-based models for urban planning. They consider different factors including the impacts of wind flow and vegetation in urban cities and canyons. The team has decided to direct its focus to improving and adding to MIT's urban weather generator by mapping elements related to the microclimate. With sufficient data, the team hopes to analyze the Midtown area and compare it to given GT sensor data.

VIP Building and Environment.pdf VIP Introductory Research.pdf

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 6

Overview

• Week Span: 2/12/2024 to 2/18/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [ ] Task 1: Further research on UWG model.

Tasks

Task 1: UWG Research- Complete

• Continue to review papers covering the UWG model and note its shortcomings:
• Link to Work: Link
• Outcome & Reflection:

Challenges & Solutions

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

Team Meetings

• Meeting Highlights:
• Lidar point cloud to view for future use as improved vegetation return;
• Peer Feedback:

Personal Reflection

• The team should vary the parameter inputs we are currently using for the analysis of models. 0.5 for vegetation is good for average but could be changed for isolated months to better match vegetation coverage.

Additional Notes & Resources (optional)

• Resource Name - Brief description.

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: Understand UWG vegetation input.

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 7

Overview

• Week Span: 2/19/2024 to 2/25/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [x] Task 1: Analysis of UWG parameters for implementation; focus on vegetation-related specifications.
• [ ] Task 2: Further research on UWG processing of files and parameters.

Tasks

Task 1: Parameter Review- Complete

• Description: Review UWG model parameter documentation and understand inputs.
• Link to Work: Link
• Outcome & Reflection: Our model is currently using six parameters: bldheight, blddensity, vertohor, grasscover, treecover, zone. Reading through the list of available parameters, vegetationCoverage, vegStart, and vegEnd stood out to me. vegStart and vegEnd would be fairly simple to implement taking in the seasons of the location and when they bud and lose their leaves. Both range from 1-12, the numerical month value. vegetationCoverage would allow the simulation to incorporate vegetation growth on buildings. The unit ranges from 0-1, representing percentage of surface coverage.

Task 2: UWG Research- Ongoing

• Current Status:
• Expected Completion:

Challenges & Solutions

• How and where to get numerical values for these parameters?

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

• We should be using more of the available parameters to improve our simulation and make it more specific to the data we are inputting.

Team Meetings

• Meeting Highlights: Dr. Kastner to provide sensitivity analysis and optimization primer, use RMSE as metric and take in vector of values, use sensitivity analysis to find 10 best parameters for UWG and optimization to prioritize- correlation matrix. Bigger picture-- run rectangles across campus to plot UHI effect.
• Peer Feedback:

Personal Reflection

Additional Notes & Resources (optional)

• Resource Name - Brief description.

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: Work on Sensitivity Analysis

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 8

Overview

• Week Span: 2/26/2024 to 3/03/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [ ] Task 1: Read through sensitivity analysis script and locate input function.
• [ ] Task 2: Analyze list of UWG input parameters to eliminate those that cannot be extracted from Open Street Maps.

Tasks

Task 1: Sensitivity Analysis Review - Ongoing

• Description: Dr. Kastner provided the starter code for the sensitivity analysis to run on the UWG. Ze and I have met various times throughout the week to read through the SA and UWG code together to find or implement an algorithm we can input.
• Link to Work: Link
• Outcome & Reflection:

Task 2: UWG Parameter Assessment - Ongoing

• Description: Sylvia can provide values for our parameters from Open Street Maps. If there are UWG parameters that cannot be extricated, we do not need to consider them for the sensitivity analysis.
• Expected Completion:

Challenges & Solutions

• Difficulty extracting function that can be input into the sensitivity analysis. UWG outputs epw file and list of values but the SA requires numerical input. Need to examine which parts of the UWG code contribute individually to each parameter and how to rewrite.
• We do not have information on Global Heating Illuminance so need means of calculating it.

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

• Learning of what sensitivity analysis is and how it can be used to optimize simulations like the urban weather generator.

Team Meetings

• Meeting Highlights: run sensitivity analysis for factor prioritization, use error metric to penalize higher deviations more than smaller ones, utilize cooling and heating degree days (first heating) to define set comfortable temperature, when sensitivity analysis is functioning take vary input values and rank the analyses.
• Peer Feedback: reset Jupyter Notebook to avoid future git cloning issues that were delaying me this week.

Personal Reflection

• Need to spend more time next week reading about how HPC clusters work and what exactly the for loop we should write should look like. I became a lot more familiar with the UWG code this week by better understanding what resides and different files and how the functions correspond with each other. I want to continue to look at the meanings of each parameter and how they are calculated.

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: Perform sensitivity analysis.
• [ ] Next Week's Task 2: Prepare code to run in PACE HPC cluster.

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 9

Overview

• Week Span: 3/4/2024 to 3/10/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [ ] Task 1: Work on Sensitivity Analysis

Tasks

Task 1: Sensitivity Analysis - Cmplete

• Description: Met with Ze throughout the week to figure out way to input array of values into calculating cooling days function. Also brainstormed running random parameter inputs x times -- random prediction accuracy. Had to wait to fix errors in second order.

Challenges & Solutions

• So many issues with importing libraries and Jupyter notebook this week!!!!! Spent so much time debugging and meeting and trying to get help but am just going to use Jupyter Notebook online instead of through VSCode. Now I can finally run the code which is very necessary!

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

• IT Help Desk is not helpful.
• Can try Google Collab or Kaggle if issues persist.

Personal Reflection

• Macs are not always so easy to work with.

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: Look at code errors.

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 10

Overview

• Week Span: 3/11/2024 to 3/17/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [ ] Task 1: UWG Errors

Tasks

Task 1: UWG Debug - Incomplete

• Description:

Challenges & Solutions

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

Personal Reflection

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1:

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 11

Overview

• Week Span: 3/11/2024 to 3/17/2024

Tasks for This Week

List your specific objectives for this week, including learning targets and project milestones.

• [ ] Task 1: Detailed description and expected outcome.

Tasks

Task: [Task Name] - (completed)

• Description:
• Link to Work: Link
• Outcome & Reflection:

Task: [Task Name] - (ongoing)

• Current Status:
• Expected Completion:

Challenges & Solutions

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

Team Meetings

• Meeting Highlights:
• Peer Feedback:

Personal Reflection

Visual Documentation (optional)

Additional Notes & Resources (optional)

• Resource Name - Brief description.

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: Description and strategy.

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 12

Overview

• Week Span: 3/18/2024 to 3/24/2024

Spring break; week off.

[sofia-mujica]

Weekly Notebook Entry — Week 13

Overview

• Week Span: 3/25/2024 to 3/31/2024

Tasks for This Week

• [x] Task 1: Review Dr. Hashemi's dissertation.

Tasks

Task 1: Dissertation Review - Complete

• Description: Dr. Farzad Hashemi's dissertation follows very similar work to our subteam's usage of the UWG to understand the UHI effect on canopy heat islands. Similar to our group, he notes the shortcomings of TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) data and utilizes LCZ (Local Climate Zone) classifications and meteorological weather data. Hashemi's study focuses on the UHI impacts on energy consumption.
• Outcome & Reflection: His focus is on UHI affect on building energy consumption. Limitations include limited dataset (need to conduct research worldwide; diverse climate conditions, urban forms, cultural practices), narrowed focus (UHI has many impacts, look into other factors), and indeterminate accuracy without real-world data comparison. We are currently testing the prioritization of input parameters for the UWG to compare them with our provided GT campus data. Hashemi does not discuss the visualization of this data for further application, though maybe a future GH plug-in.

General Takeaway, Skills & Knowledge Acquired

• We might want to look at LCZs for the classification of buildings in future application.

Team Meetings

• Meeting Highlights:
• Peer Feedback:

Visual Documentation

• VIP Hashemi Thesis.pdf

Additional Notes & Resources

• Dr. Hashemi's Dissertation - Link to analyzed dissertation, "Novel Parametric Workflow for Simulating the UHI Effects on Building Energy Performance: A Case Study of Seven U.S. Cities".

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Plans for Next Week

• [ ] Next Week's Task 1: