Modeling Water Bodies in Dragonfly

How would you model a body of water in a Dragonfly model? There seems to be only settings for grass and pavement for ground cover.

Hi mlandis4!
It’s simple: you can’t. Dragonfly (among other things) uses the UWG engine (https://github.com/ladybug-tools/uwg) which is based on a 1-D urban canyon model. You have a couple of choices:

  • Use another piece of software that can model the urban climate at city/region level. If it is the microclimate you want look for the free version of envi-met (for academic purposes).
  • Alternatively you can use butterfly and model the water surface with a reasonable surface temperature (ideally this should change in an hourly basis). Check this paper for an indicated workflow: http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/BS2017/BS2017_260.pdf
  • Place a datalogger near the desired water body and measure the air temperature and RH on the spot. Place a second datalogger inside the city and compare results. This is the safest approach because you can then create an empirical model from observations.

Hope this helps
Aris

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Please also check this and this

Thank you both for the responses. It looks like, for now, I will be moving on to Envi-met.

Hello, I’m startinf with Dragonfly and I was wondering too how to approach to areas nearby lakes, rivers or even on the coast. I’ve looked into the topic @devang quoted, and found something interesting but not decisive. Are there any news about this?

it would be worth reading this also.