Teaching.
Urban Physics
As a lead lecturer for the course Urban Physics, I teach state-of-the-art in urban climate research for students at ETH Zurich since 2019, along with my colleagues and invited lecturers. Urban Physics covers a series of interesting and imperative topics, ranging from urban heat islands, urban wind, urban vegetation, comfort and urban climate mitigation, etc. Every semester we offer workshops in the forms of laboratory tests or field measurements.
Research Projects
Masters Thesis Project
Paris land cover and urban heat island
mACHINE LEARNING FOR UNDERSTANDING URBAN CLIMATE
The ultimate cooling benefits that plants and trees may bring to cities depend on a series of connected factors, such as plant cover, the presence of ventilation corridors, urban textiles, etc.
Machine learning can be a powerful tool for better understanding the contribution of plant and urban trees in heat mitigation. An effective machine learning model for assessing the city-scale cooling benefit of the plant at high spatio-temporal resolution will be proposed. Land cover, urban morphology, and social-economic information will be encoded to be key explanatory factors. The model will ultimately facilitate decision-makers to plan heat mitigation strategies.
Masters Thesis Project
Porous Vegetation in the ETH & EMPA Wind Tunnel
Wind Tunnel at ETH & EMPA
Aerodynamic and thermal effects of vegetation on urban climate
While the evapotranspiration and shading effects have been examined extensively by the research community, understanding of aerodynamic resistance of vegetations at street and neighborhood scales is still limited. Insight into the influence on airflow and heat transfer is crucial for guiding vegetation implementations for urban heat island mitigations.
PIV Techniques
Videos for PIV
Videos for PIV
PIV Raw Images of a Jet Flow
PIV Measured Boundary Layer
PIV Raw Images of a Vortex Ring
Pilot Your PIV.
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© 2019 by Yongling Zhao, Ph.D.