The limited space available does not only lead to an increasingly dense urban areas, but also to urban sprawl into regions normally not meant for human settlement like desert settlements or tropical mega-cities.

Building up houses and paving the surface changes the environmental conditions in urban areas significantly, raising the question how the urban environment could be designed to offer the best possible climate conditions to the citizens.

But not only extreme regional climate conditions such as deserts can cause hostile outdoor environments - unpleasant local conditions can also be generated by bad urban design. Well know effects are wind gusts caused by jet effects at building corners, accumulation of air pollution or non-comfortable thermal outdoor conditions.

Planers and architects wishing to maintain or increase the quality of urban areas must be aware that the urban microclimate is an extremely complex system consisting of many feedback loops and nonlinear relationships between the different natural and artificial element.

If you are interested how building design interacts with local climate (or the other way round if the building is your main point of interest), high-resolution numerical computer models are the tool to look for...

ENVI-met is a three-dimensional computer model designed to analyze the small scale interactions between urban design and the mircoclimate.

The model combines the calculation of fluid dynamics parameters such as wind flow or turbulence with the thermodynamic processes taking place at the ground surface, at walls and roofs or at plants.

With a typical resolution between 0.5 m and 10 m, the model is able to simulate even complicated geometric forms such as terraces, balconies or complex quarters.