Interpreting Local Climatic Data: A Lecture by Professor Anir Upadhyay

The talk provided an overview of prevalent approaches of understanding climatic data and their inefficiency in usefulness to designers as well as a researcher of the built environment. Architects and built heritage professionals require an in-depth understanding of local climate in order to appreciate climate sensitivity embedded in built heritage and to adopt design and retrofitting strategies in the changing climatic context. Professor Upadhyay shared his recent research addressing the underlying issues of climate data analysis and presentation and the uses of informative graphics to express local climate in a meaningful way. He shared some of his preliminary analysis of representative locations from the conventional climate zones of India, which showed significant variation in local climates than they are portrayed by the generalised climate classification. For example, Ahmedabad is considered as ‘hot and dry’ zone in the conventional climate classification but detailed climate analysis suggests Ahmedabad as predominantly humid in terms of thermal comfort. At the end of the talk, Professor Upadhyay shared his integrated platform which analyzes quantitative climate/ weather data and indoor environmental data and presents it in a simplified way using a dashboard.

Professor Anir Upadhyay is an Architect and Urban Planner, with a PhD in Sustainable Design from the University of Sydney, Australia. His research mainly interrogates real-world problems related to sustainability and energy efficiency in the built environment. He has developed a new approach to climate data analysis for built-environment professionals, which he talked about in his presentation.