Tools & data
Tools and data
The urban land-surface model I help lead and maintain, what it is used for, and the code and data that feed it.
Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme: an urban land-surface model developed as an international collaboration with Sue GrimmondiD and many others, in which I am one of the lead developers and the day-to-day maintainer. With its Python interface, groups worldwide use it to simulate how a city exchanges heat and water with the atmosphere.
suews.io → · The team →
In practice
Arup · UHeat Industry
Scientific consultancy quantifying the urban heat island across ten global megacities, feeding Arup’s UHeat tool, which combines satellite imagery and open climate data to find the buildings and materials driving urban heat.
UHeat →
New York City · Climate Budgeting City government
Member of the Expert Technical Advisory Group for the city’s climate budgeting. The FY 2026 climate budget models the cooling benefit of New York’s tree-planting programme with SUEWS, in collaboration with Hunter College, UCL and the NYC Parks Department.
The programme → · FY 2026 report (PDF) →
SHAFTS & GLAMOUR
Building height and footprint are the two morphological features an urban climate model needs, and no good global description of them existed. SHAFTS is the multi-task deep-learning package that reads both off public Sentinel imagery; GLAMOUR is the dataset it produced, giving average height and footprint at 0.0009° resolution across urbanised areas worldwide, validated in 18 cities. Both were led by Ruidong LiiD, my co-supervised PhD student at Tsinghua University.
A searchable database of 9,284 urban climate papers from 121 countries, distilled from two decades of the IAUC Bibliography Committee’s catalogue. Led by Chenghao WangiD with a team of expert reviewers; I built its LLM pipeline.
A browsable database of 577 studies on anthropogenic heat in cities, each with its structured evidence on forcing, sensitivity and feedback: how much heat cities release, how urban temperatures respond, and how feedbacks modify that response. It is the evidence behind our review of anthropogenic heat in urban climate systems, led by Dan LiiD.