Restaurant patios in the middle of summer can be a hotbed of sunburns and melted ice cubes, while large cities can be bubbles of higher temperatures with poor circulation. Climate and performance engineering firms like Rowan Williams Davies and Irwin Inc. (RWDI) use data from NASA’s Predication of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) database to provide global solutions for thermal comfort, so people can enjoy a meal or walk outside anytime of the year.
The NASA POWER project provides an array of free solar and surface meteorological data products, sourced from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) mission, NASA Langley Research Center’s Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) in association with the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) program, NASA Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, and Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Application, Version 2 (MERRA-2). POWER data is analysis-ready and accessible through an application programming interface (API), ArcGIS Image Services, and the project’s Data Access Viewer, an interactive online tool used for data visualization.
RWDI uses POWER’s solar data, such as solar irradiance, which is the amount of solar energy reaching a specific area on Earth’s surface. The company pairs this data with its own in-house tools to conduct analyses and build recommendations to improve efficiency and comfort for its clients. RWDI’s Associate Principal and the Global Practice Leader for Building Performance, Ryan Danks, said, “POWER allows us to be more precise in our analyses. It allows us to use climate inputs that are specific to the site no matter where that may be.”
RWDI specializes in understanding how natural and built environments interact. In addition to advising on outdoor thermal comfort, RWDI helps clients avoid property damage from reflected light and heat from buildings. Adapting and updating infrastructure can be costly, so RWDI uses POWER to ensure its solutions are efficient and sustainable for their clients and without error.
Imagine parking your car on the street and returning only to find warped panels, softened plastic, and other heat-related damage. This may be hard to believe but this has happened, and the culprit was a building whose curved exterior created multiple converging reflections, focusing heat onto the car like a magnifying glass. Such a scenario and the integration of reflection studies is one example of how RWDI has used POWER data to make impactful mitigation recommendations.
RWDI also implements POWER data in larger scale studies to help campuses and communities minimize the urban heat island effect. This effect is caused by human-made heat sources, such as cars and air conditioners, as well as heat-trapping designs and materials used to build cities. This in turn leads to noticeably warmer temperatures in urban areas compared to their surroundings, increased energy consumption, as well as higher and more concentrated pollution.
RWDI uses POWER data with its software tools to provide the best solutions to mitigate urban heating. Approaches can range from localized shading, altered landscape, all the way to realigning roads and buildings to enhance airflow or create shade. The implementation of these recommendations can be complicated, which is why RWDI finds POWER’s solar data invaluable because of its historical coverage and reliability.
“We work everywhere on Earth. POWER is one of only a few databases that we can use that gives us all the information we need,” said Danks. He expressed that this is just one of the many reasons his firm uses NASA POWER data.
Users of NASA POWER data, like RWDI, demonstrate the importance and demand of reliable globally-gridded solar data that can be easily and freely accessed by organizations anywhere in the world.