ECOTEN urban comfort specializes in urban environmental science and engineering. We provide our technical services to city planners and urban development stakeholders to help them develop resiliency to extreme heat in cities and urban projects worldwide using earth observation and urban microclimate simulation technology. With these technologies, we can help cool the urban environment through a nature-based urban design approach.

Our services are designed to be a decision-making tool for urban design to develop scenarios for effective cooling for cities during extreme heat events.

Urban Heat Vulnerability Assessment

In this service, we provide a series of maps and data from satellite imagery from NASA and ESA satellites and produce the Urban Heat Vulnerability Map of a given city which is used as a decision-making tool for our customers (urban planners and designers) to identify which areas in the city are most vulnerable to extreme heat events using the Urban Heat Vulnerability Index which is an index calculated from a combination of satellite and open data to measure the exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity and heat vulnerability using the IPCC framework of vulnerability assessment. Using these maps, we provide analytics to help urban planners make informed decisions policies about initiating heat resiliency initiatives for their city.

Urban Microclimate Simulations Assessment

In this service, we take a closer look at a given urban area that needs to be developed and redeveloped and study the cause of overheating due to extreme heat events by simulating the urban microclimate in these areas using the urban simulations software suite called SOLENE-microclimat. Using the results (air temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation and confort index), we can propose new heat resilient urban design using the effective implementation of blue-green-white infrastructure (green areas, trees, green roofs, green walls, water bodies, white roofing, lighter colored painting for buildings, building materials). We can also validate the impacts of such heat resilient urban designs compared to the existing urban designs to show the effectiveness of the new designs before they are implemented.

Urban Resiliency API Services

This new service is being developed with the support from European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre in the Czech Republic which will deliver latest satellite data and other data to urban stakeholders and smart city application developers for their projects.