arXiv subjects

Ronita Bardhan

Publications and source records attributed to Ronita Bardhan.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From physical surfaces to human-centric heat stress: LST and UTCI heat mapping reveals nonlinear effects of urban morphology

Heat exposure connects the built environment and public health, directly shaping the livability and sustainability of urban areas. Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of heat exposure and its drivers is vital for climate-adaptive urban planning. However, most planning-oriented studies rely on land surface temperature (LST), and whether LST adequately represents human heat exposure and how it differs from physiologically relevant heat stress remains insufficiently examined. Here, using Landsat-retrieved 30-m LST and GPU-accelerated 1-m universal thermal climate index (UTCI) in Singapore, this study establishes a comprehensive "Modeling-Comparing-Assessing" framework to systematically evaluate the spatial and mechanistic differences between these two metrics. We further investigate their pronounced non-stationary and threshold-based relationships with urban factors using a novel geographically weighted XGBoost (GW-XGBoost) and generalized additive model (GAM) workflow. Our results reveal substantial differences in the spatial patterns of LST and UTCI, along with marked spatial heterogeneity in how 2D and 3D urban factors impact these thermal metrics, as demonstrated by explainable GW-XGBoost models (test R2 = 0.855 for LST and 0.905 for UTCI). Crucially, spatially explicit SHAP shows that sky view factor plays a central role in explaining UTCI variability but exhibits a comparatively marginal independent contribution to LST, indicating that LST inadequately captures shading-driven and radiative processes governing actual human heat stress. Moreover, SHAP-GAM analysis indicates that higher albedo is associated with increased UTCI. These findings provide model-informed planning implications for integrating physiologically relevant thermal indices to support targeted heat risk management and human-centric urban planning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Airborne assessment uncovers socioeconomic stratification of urban nature in England

Nature access is increasingly recognised as a public health and equity imperative, yet cities lack standardised ways to measure who benefits from green infrastructure. We present the first national, building-level assessment of the 3-30-300 urban greening rule across England, integrating high-performance computing with open LiDAR and geospatial datasets. Our framework quantifies proximity, availability, and accessibility of greenery, linking each to socioeconomic deprivation through Gini-based inequality metrics. Results reveal that while most English residents meet the tree visibility criterion, only 0.1% of urban areas meet all three thresholds; canopy cover and park access sharply diverge along deprivation lines. Wealthier areas enjoy greater ambient greenness, whereas deprived urban cores often have better proximity to parks but lower vegetation density. The study offers a scalable computational blueprint for assessing nature equity and demonstrates that green accessibility represents a new dimension of socioeconomic inequality. These findings call for policy approaches that move beyond proximity metrics toward equitable, quality-based standards for nature access.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Heatwave increases nighttime light intensity in hyperdense cities of the Global South: A double machine learning study

Heatwaves, intensified by climate change and rapid urbanisation, pose significant threats to urban systems, particularly in the Global South, where adaptive capacity is constrained. This study investigates the relationship between heatwaves and nighttime light (NTL) radiance, a proxy of nighttime economic activity, in four hyperdense cities: Delhi, Guangzhou, Cairo, and Sao Paulo. We hypothesised that heatwaves increase nighttime activity. Using a double machine learning (DML) framework, we analysed data from 2013 to 2019 to quantify the impact of heatwaves on NTL while controlling for local climatic confounders. Results revealed a statistically significant increase in NTL intensity during heatwaves, with Cairo, Delhi, and Guangzhou showing elevated NTL on the third day, while São Paulo exhibits a delayed response on the fourth day. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of these findings, indicating that prolonged heat stress prompts urban populations to shift activities to night. Heterogeneous responses across cities highlight the possible influence of urban morphology and adaptive capacity to heatwave impacts. Our findings provide a foundation for policymakers to develop data-driven heat adaptation strategies, ensuring that cities remain liveable and economically resilient in an increasingly warming world.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

NEBULA: A National Scale Dataset for Neighbourhood-Level Urban Building Energy Modelling for England and Wales

Buildings are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 26% of global energy sector emissions in 2022. Meeting net zero goals requires a rapid reduction in building emissions, both directly from the buildings and indirectly from the production of electricity and heat used in buildings. National energy planning for net zero demands both detailed and comprehensive building energy consumption data. However, geo-located building-level energy data is rarely available in Europe, with analysis typically relying on anonymised, simulated or low-resolution data. To address this problem, we introduce a dataset of Neighbourhood Energy, Buildings, and Urban Landscapes (NEBULA) for modelling domestic energy consumption for small neighbourhoods (5-150 households). NEBULA integrates data on building characteristics, climate, urbanisation, environment, and socio-demographics and contains 609,964 samples across England and Wales.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Energy Mapping of Existing Building Stock in Cambridge using Energy Performance Certificates and Thermal Infrared Imagery

Energy performance certificate (EPC) and thermal infrared (TIR) images both play a key role in the energy performance mapping of the urban building stock. In this paper, we developed parametric building archetypes using an EPC database and conducted temperature clustering on TIR images acquired through drones and satellite datasets. We evaluated 1725 EPCs of existing building stock in Cambridge, UK to generate energy consumption profiles. Drone-based TIR images of individual buildings in two Cambridge University colleges were processed using a machine learning pipeline for thermal anomaly detection and investigated the influence of two specific factors that affect the reliability of TIR for energy management applications: ground sample distance (GSD) and angle of view (AOV). The EPC-level results suggest that the construction year of the buildings influences their energy consumption. For example, modern buildings were over 30% more energy-efficient than older ones. Parallelly, older buildings were found to show almost double the energy savings potential through retrofitting than newly constructed buildings. TIR imaging results showed that thermal anomalies can only be properly identified in images with a GSD of 1m/pixel or less. A GSD of 1-6m/pixel can detect hot areas of building surfaces. We found that a GSD > 6m/pixel cannot characterise individual buildings but does help identify urban heat island effects. Additional sensitivity analysis showed that building thermal anomaly detection is more sensitive to AOV than to GSD. Our study informs newer approaches to building energy diagnostics using thermography and supports decision-making for retrofitting at a large scale.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2023

Aligning Three-Decade Surge in Urban Cooling with Global Warming

Rising demand for space cooling has been placing enormous strain on various technological, environmental, and societal dimensions, resulting in issues related to energy consumption, environmental sustainability, health and well-being, affordability, and equity. Holistic approaches that combine energy efficiency optimization, policy-making, and societal adaptation must be rapidly promoted as viable, timely solutions. We interpret the 30-year upward trend and spikes in urban cooling demand from the perspective of climate change, urbanization, and background climates, focusing on five representative cities: Hong Kong, Sydney, Montreal, Zurich, and London. An unequivocal, worrying upward trend in cooling demand is observed in meteorological data from 1990 to 2021, using cooling degree hours (CDH) as a city-scale metric. The surge in cooling energy demand can be largely attributed to global warming, urban heat islands, and extreme heat events. Further, our quantification of the impact of the base temperature, in relation to the historical CDH, reveals that a 20% energy saving could be achieved instantly within a rather broad range of temperature and humidity by increasing the setpoint temperature by one degree, while characteristic sensational and physiological levels can be maintained at 'acceptable' and 'physiological thermal neutrality' respectively. However, the potential of reducing cooling demand can be nonlinearly and significantly lowered due to the presence of compound high relative humidity and high air temperature. To reduce cooling energy demand rapidly in a warming climate, we highlight the necessity of promoting hard and soft behavioral adaptation along with regulatory intervention for the operation of space cooling systems.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Time-evolving Impact of Trees on Street Canyon Microclimate

Nowadays, cities are frequently exposed to heatwaves, worsening the outdoor thermal comfort and increasing cooling energy demand in summer. Urban forestry is seen as one of the viable and preferable solutions to combating extreme heat events and urban heat island (UHI) in times of climate change. While many cities have initiated tree-planting programmes in recent years, the evolving impact of trees on street microclimate, in a time span of up to several decades, remains unclear. We investigate the cooling effects of linden trees in five groups, i.e., 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-60, and 60-100 years old. The leaf area index (LAI) and leaf area density (LAD) vary nonlinearly as the trees grow, peaking at different ages. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations solving microclimate are performed for an idealized street canyon with trees of varied age groups. Turbulent airflow, heat and moisture transport, shortwave and longwave radiation, shading and transpiration are fully coupled and solved in OpenFOAM. The meteorological data, including air temperature, wind speed, moisture, and shortwave radiation of the heatwave in Zurich (June 2019), are applied as boundary conditions. The results show that young trees in the age group of 10-20 years old provide little heat mitigation at the pedestrian level in an extreme heat event. Optimal heat mitigation by trees is observed for the group of 30-60 years old trees. Finally, the potential impact of growing trees as a heat mitigation measure on air ventilation is evaluated.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2023

The time-evolving impact of tree size on nighttime street canyon microclimate: Wind tunnel modeling of aerodynamic effects and heat removal

Urban trees play a crucial role in urban climate in many aspects. However, existing research has not adequately explored the impact from a time-evolving perspective, that is, tree growth over time. To bridge this research gap, this study investigates in a wind tunnel the effects of tree-to-canyon foliage cover and relative height (0.32-1.1 times canyon height), mimicking growth of trees, on conditions in street canyons during moderate and extreme heat. The results reveal that trees may affect canyon-wide ventilation and heat removal in two different scenarios. First, when canyons are in isothermal conditions, medium and large trees, that fill half the canyon height or reach slightly above the canyon, decelerate the shear layer and weaken the vortical flow, as a result reducing the canyon-wide ventilation. Second, in extreme heat conditions, medium and large trees trap heat at the pedestrian level due to the blockage of air entrainment and the suppression of upward buoyancy-driven flow from the ground surface. An air temperature rise that corresponds to 1.5 degree Celsius in a full-scale urban setting is observed in measurements. These observations suggest that urban trees' foliage cover must be managed for a canyon's optimal ventilation and heat removal during nighttime.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2020

India nudges to contain COVID-19 pandemic: a reactive public policy analysis using machine-learning based topic modelling

India locked down 1.3 billion people on March 25, 2020 in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. The economic cost of it was estimated at USD 98 billion, while the social costs are still unknown. This study investigated how government formed reactive policies to fight coronavirus across its policy sectors. Primary data was collected from the Press Information Bureau (PIB) in the form press releases of government plans, policies, programme initiatives and achievements. A text corpus of 260,852 words was created from 396 documents from the PIB. An unsupervised machine-based topic modelling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was performed on the text corpus. It was done to extract high probability topics in the policy sectors. The interpretation of the extracted topics was made through a nudge theoretic lens to derive the critical policy heuristics of the government. Results showed that most interventions were targeted to generate endogenous nudge by using external triggers. Notably, the nudges from the Prime Minister of India was critical in creating herd effect on lockdown and social distancing norms across the nation. A similar effect was also observed around the public health (e.g., masks in public spaces; Yoga and Ayurveda for immunity), transport (e.g., old trains converted to isolation wards), micro, small and medium enterprises (e.g., rapid production of PPE and masks), science and technology sector (e.g., diagnostic kits, robots and nano-technology), home affairs (e.g., surveillance and lockdown), urban (e.g. drones, GIS-tools) and education (e.g., online learning). A conclusion was drawn on leveraging these heuristics are crucial for lockdown easement planning.

cs.CY↗