CoolPath Tool: A Thermal Comfort Path Planning Tool for Urban Mobility

TL;DR

The CoolPath Tool uses high-resolution thermal modeling and real-time route mapping to suggest walking and biking routes that minimize heat stress, improving safety and comfort during hot weather in urban environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel route planning system that integrates thermal comfort indices with urban microclimate modeling for personalized, heat-aware navigation.

Findings

Significantly reduces heat exposure on recommended routes

Identifies shaded, thermally comfortable paths in urban areas

Scalable approach applicable to other cities globally

Abstract

Extreme heat poses a growing challenge for active transportation in cities where conventional weather reporting (e.g. limited air temperature measurement for the whole city) fails to capture the large microclimate variations that pedestrians and cyclists experience. We present a novel walking and biking route planning tool (''CoolPath Tool'') that selects paths based on thermal comfort using the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) rather than just distance or travel time. This system combines high-resolution thermal modeling with real-time route mapping. We generate city-scale UTCI maps using GPU version of Solar and LongWave Environmental Irradiance Geometry (SOLWEIG) model, to account for urban features (buildings, trees,) and weather conditions. The urban features are pre-mapped using satellite data products and the routes are the roadways. For any given origin and destination, our tool calculates the average UTCI along each possible route and recommends the ''coolest'' route, i.e. the path with the lowest heat stress (often the most shaded or otherwise thermally comfortable), while still being reasonably direct. We demonstrate this in a case study for Austin, Texas. The approach identifies routes that significantly reduce pedestrians' heat exposure (often recommending routes with a much larger proportion of shade). Such thermally-informed route planning has important public well-being, and economic implications: by helping people avoid dangerous heat hotspots and sun-exposed areas, it can reduce the risk of heat-related illness and make walking or biking a safer choice even on hot days. This tool is part of the Austin Digital Twin efforts developed as part the UT-City CoLab needs. The work while demonstrated for Austin, TX is scalable, and transferrable to other cities globally.