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How to beat the heat in cities through urban climate modelling

More than half the world’s population lives in cities, which are hotter than rural areas. Jan Carmeliet and Dominique Derome explain what physics modelling can show about how cities get hot, and how to cool them.

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Fig. 1: Understanding the urban climate at the microscale.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all those that contributed to this article directly or indirectly, and especially A. Kubilay, A. Rubin, D. Strebel and Y. Zhao. The authors would like to thank B. Voisard, S. D. Meadows and P. A. Johnson for comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by the SWEET-SWICE project, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the Future Resilient Systems project of Singapore-ETH Centre and the Canada Research Chairs program.

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Correspondence to Jan Carmeliet.

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Carmeliet, J., Derome, D. How to beat the heat in cities through urban climate modelling. Nat Rev Phys 6, 2–3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-023-00673-1

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