Micro-Climate Analysis

[ncoleman38U57]

Hi,

Our team is trying to preform a Microclimate analysis on one of our projects. We have imported .obj files for our buildings, bridges and hardscaped areas. However we are finding that the analysis is only capturing building shade on the terrain which in our case is set lower than the hardscape as we are building on water front.

When running a solar analysis, forma is able to read the hardscape and give the appropriate values.

We don't want to raise our terrain as this will make our building shorter and thus diminishing the value of the report.

Is there any way to solve this issue or a temporary work around?

[erlend_amdal · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The microclimate analysis does not capture readings on top of geometries other than the terrain, so if you add other geometries to act as top surfaces, the analysis will not give any readings on these surfaces. We are aware that this is an inconvenient limitation, and in the future we may be able to provide microclimate readings on top of other geometries like we do for other analyses.

Thus, your only option right now is to raise the terrain to match the planned hardscaping. You may do this for bridges as well, though depending on the construction of the bridge it might make inaccurate wind conditions. You can read about editing terrain in this article.

[Ethan_mok]

Please make it a priority to enable analysing microclimates on top of geometry and buildings! This is a sorely missing feature and it's very strange that the other analysis options have this ability except microclimates.

This is especially important for podium-tower typologies (very common in some regions outside US-EU) where we want to analyse how towers affect the microclimate of the top of the podium.

The feature is essentially useless for us right now as it can only show us the microclimate of outside of our plot boundary and hardscape.

Any update on whether this feature can be added would be appreciated. Thanks.

[erlend_amdal]

Hi @Ethan_mok,

Thank you for sharing your use case for microclimate analyses! We see that podium-tower topologies can be a pain point for microclimate analysis, and there are probably many other use cases that can be unlocked by bringing microclimate analysis on top of buildings as well. As you pointed out, it's supported by other analyses so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to bring it to microclimate as well. I'll bring it up with the team to see if we can prioritize it.

I see you also created a separate thread with your feedback, so I will reply there as well.