MOSAIK - Model-based city planning and application in climate change

MOSAIK is a ​BMBF funded German-wide research project within the call "Stadtklima im Wandel" (urban climate under change, ​[UC]²) that aims at developing a new modern and highly-efficient urban climate model. The MOSAIK consortium consists of partners from entire Germany that have joined their forces to create urban climate model, to be called PALM-4U, of unprecedented spatial resolution and computational performance and which shall allows simulations of large cities of size of up to 2.000 km² with grid-resolved buildings.

The first funding period of MOSAIK started in June 2016.

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The first release candidate of PALM-4U was released in October 2018. Visit ​palm4u.org

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Some features of PALM-4U...

• Magnifying lens function (zoom function) that allows planners to perform high-resolution studies for areas of interest of limited size (city quarters, single building environments).
• Nesting to large scale models.
• Large-eddy simulation mode, which allows to estimate turbulence induced fluctuations (e.g. peak concentrations or wind gusts) for the first time with a PALM-4U.
• Scale-dependent turbulence and building parameterizations to run with varying resolution from 1-100 m.
• Graphical user interface for end users such as city planners, which allows to set up the model, implement planning scenarios, conduct simulations, and visualize the model output data.
• NetCDF as Standard I/O data format.
• Output of human-related quantities as physiological equivalent temperature (PET) or universal thermal climate index (UTCI) but also use a multi-agent system (MAS) to determine critical hotspots based on the behavior of people.
• A standard catalog of input data for typical weather/climate scenarios, including high-risk scenarios such as heat waves.

These features will allow both simulations with very high spatial resolution (down to 1m) for large cities or
long climate projections as well as more focused simulations with coarser resolution, and exemplary periods or specific areas
(e.g. for city planners) with limited computer resources.

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UPCOMING EVENTS
11-12 Mar 2019	6th MOSAIK meeting @ KIT (Garmisch-Patenkirchen, Germany)
18-22 Mar 2019	DACH 2019 (Garmisch-Patenkirchen, Germany) ​Conference website