Green Roof Resource

Yesterday, the BBC in article entitled, Test driving a cityscape, summarized efforts to improve urban planning through 3D modelling. France’s Center for Building Technology (CSTB) has used 3D models to better understand lighting and noise pollution within a city. The models are used to evaluate the impact of new development on a community. More than half of us on the planet now live in urban environments. Educated planning decisions will impact the quality of life within these communities. I’d like to see more integration of 3D models and   contaminant fate models within the urban environment.

I’ve been playing around with these models and working on integrating the vegetation compartment to look at green roofs. For those interested in environmental fate, they are quite useful. Now you can see what sort of contaminants could be in the fish you eat thanks to the Canadian Environmental Modelling Centre.

I’ve come across this program several times through my reading. While I’m a long way off from running any simulations, thought I’d throw this program out there. Crystal Ball is a windows program (boo) that adds functionality to an excel sheet for running Monte Carlo simulations instead of simple deterministic solutions. Looks like it could be useful for setting up fugacity models at a later date.