Earth's Future · 2026

AI + Optimization + Urban Climate Model Development

From new climate-process code to decision-ready adaptation: a closed workflow for designing rainwater harvesting and roof sprinkling under extreme urban heat.

Junjie Yu, Keith W. Oleson, Yue Qin, Lei Zhao, David O. Topping & Zhonghua Zheng

Research demo only. This page is a visual introduction to the project. Please read the full article below for the complete methodology, assumptions, numerical results, limitations and supporting evidence.

Integrated research pipeline

Model. Learn. Search. Evaluate.

The workflow couples physical process development with a fast AI approximation, enabling multi-objective search without running the full urban climate model for every candidate design.

Model development: Roof runoff fills a bounded tank; water is released when roof temperature crosses a selected threshold, changing evaporation, surface temperature and building heat transfer.

What the framework reveals

Three design insights

01

Trigger timing dominates

The roof-temperature threshold is more influential than tank size or sprinkling intensity across the tested design space.

02

Bigger is not always better

Increasing storage improves performance, but the marginal cooling-energy benefit diminishes as tank size grows.

03

Benefits extend beyond energy

Optimized strategies lower extreme temperatures, reduce heatwave days and mitigate extreme surface runoff.

Decision space

The Pareto frontier

There is no single best design. Each point represents a defensible compromise: smaller infrastructure at one end, greater cooling-energy reduction at the other.

The curve's flattening makes the diminishing return visible and helps decision-makers select a solution that matches local constraints.

Non-dominated candidate designs

Conceptual re-rendering based on the study workflow and reported Pareto relationship; not a reproduction of the paper's numerical dataset.

Full research article

Read beyond the demo

Optimizing the Rainwater Harvesting and Roof Sprinkling System to Adapt to Urban Extreme Heat

Yu, J., Oleson, K., Qin, Y., Zhao, L., Topping, D., and Zheng, Z.: Optimizing the Rainwater Harvesting and Roof Sprinkling System to Adapt to Urban Extreme Heat, Earth's Future, 14, e2026EF008876, 2026.

Collaborators: NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Peking University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Media Highlights: The University of Manchester, The National, Euronews, The Economic Times, Water Magazine, Sustainable Futures at UoM, and Mirage News.

🎧 Audio:
🇨🇳 中文
🇬🇧 English

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