Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat

Climate change presents cities with new challenges, which require new forms of collaboration between urban planning, climate adaptation and research. The project Immersive Analytics for Urban Heat intends to design and develop a system for immersive visual analysis that will enable visualization and interactive exploration of the occurrence of extreme heat in Norrköpings urban environment. The proposed immersive visual analytics system aims to support dialogue, decision-making, and planning of climate adaptation by enabling users to interact with relevant multidimensional environmental and climate data which will be represented in the specific urban context.

The envisioned immersive analytics system will thus make it possible to identify and explore heat-prone areas in the urban environment (for example during a heat wave) and the occurrence of urban heat islands this together with relevant surrounding and contextual information about the city to better understand when and why extreme heat occurs and thus create opportunities for better urban planning and climate adaptation in relevant areas operations. In addition to the societal benefit, the project will produce new basic research in immersive collaborative visuals data analysis as well as applications and prototypes for Norrköping's decision arena and the visualization centre.

Several partners are involved in this work coming from several institutions: LiU ITN (Katerina Vrotsou [PI], Nico Reski, Andreas Kerren), LiU TEMAM (Tina Neset, Lotten Wiréhn, Carlo Navarra), SMHI (Jorge Humberto Amorim, Isabel Ribeiro), Norrköping Municipality (Merja Willman, Fanny Germer), and Linnaeus University (Aris Alissandrakis).

The project is funded by Norrköping Fund for Research and Development.