Urban cooling and climate adaptation software

ENVI-met is a three-dimensional microclimate simulation software that enables the creation of sustainable living conditions in a constantly changing environment. ENVI-met’s interactive applications can scientifically analyze the effects of different design scenarios developed by architects or urban planners.

The calculation modules of ENVI-met cover a wide range of scientific disciplines – from fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to plant physiology and soil science.

The guiding principle of ENVI-met is to integrate all these different approaches into a single model, so that all elements can interact and reproduce the observed synergies.

This distinguishes ENVI-met from other modeling platforms for environmental simulation. There are many that calculate airflow between buildings or solar radiation on facades, but few that look at the complex urban environment as a single system and consider the multitude of processes that take place between elements.

ENVI-met is a microclimate simulation software. It simulates a specific meteorological situation (e.g. hot summer days) for a specific planning scenario (generally the size of a neighborhood). The horizontal resolution is typically 1-10 m, with simulated periods ranging from 1 to 5 days.

The size of the model domain is typically between 50×50 and 500×500 grid cells horizontally and 20-50 grid cells vertically. A very typical application would be a comparison of two scenarios (base case versus a greened case), both analyzed within a 48 hour period, and a model domain size of 250x250x30 grid cells (X, Y, Z) at 3 m resolution, resulting in a 750×750 m domain.

ENVI-met can calculate environments of various sizes – from individual building blocks to entire urban areas. However, larger models require a more powerful computer and more memory.

ENVI-met is based on physical equations and is designed for high resolution simulations. However, the basic physics of the model should work for much larger areas and coarser grid resolutions. Therefore, ENVI-met can also be used for mesoscale models. The prerequisite for this is that the characteristics of the area can be represented within the digital model area concept used in ENVI-met (for example, there are no mixed land use options in ENVI-met as there are in some mesoscale models).

ENVI-met offers plugins for QGIS, SketchUp and Grasshopper, making it easy to integrate into your current workflow.

ENVI-met requires model data and weather data for its simulations. Model data can come from your designs (via QGIS, SketchUp or Grasshopper plugins) or open data such as OpenStreetMap.

For weather data, ENVI-met accepts formats such as CSV files from weather stations, EPW files or user-created meteorological scenarios. The software uses this data to simulate interactions between the built environment and microclimatic factors such as temperature, humidity and wind.

As mentioned in the previous question, ENVI-met is designed for microclimatic analysis. While some building variables can be calculated, ENVI-met is not recommended for Building Performance Simulation (BPS) analysis. However, with some effort, ENVI-met simulations can be run for a full year and these results can be used to support BPS.

ENVI-met can export text files describing the microclimate along selected buildings. These files can be used directly in other building energy simulation (BES) software such as Energy Plus.

Yes, ENVI-met can be run on cloud services if Windows can be used as the operating system.

Theoretically yes, but it will probably run much slower in a virtualized environment. It would be better to create a partition on the hard drive to install Windows if ENVI-met simulations are needed on that computer. Another option would be to run the simulation in a cloud service.

Yes, with the Science, City and Enterprise licenses you can run parallel simulations and thus significantly reduce the simulation time.

Yes, if the system has enough RAM and CPU cores are available for this purpose.

Yes and no. On the one hand ENVI-met is a typical Windows program, on the other hand it has certain system requirements (e.g. ENVI-met uses RAM permanently for reading and writing during a simulation).

In parallel mode, ENVI-met also uses all the CPU power it can get, but still allows other programs to run. However, the computer may be slower for other tasks. ENVI-met may appear to be frozen or “not responding”, but it is actively working in the background.

There are many documents and video tutorials on our website that are updated regularly. You can also use our support center to exchange ideas with other users.

Computing power depends primarily on CPU speed and the number of cores. More cores and faster CPU will allow faster simulations. RAM requirements will increase with future versions of ENVI-met, and computers with limited memory may be limited in the size of the model domain. Simulation performance does not depend on the graphics card as all calculations are performed by the CPU.
The amount of disk space required depends mainly on the application. An average 48 hour simulation of a large model domain may require about 100 GB. Since several scenarios are usually simulated for comparison, disk space may be a limitation if there is no other space available to store the simulation results.

CPU: Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
RAM: 8 GB
OS: Windows 10 64-bit or higher
VIDEO CARD: No specific requirements
FREE DISK SPACE: more than 10 GB

CPU: Modern 6- or 8-core CPU, Intel i5-8400 – or higher
Ryzen 5 1600X or better
RAM: 32 GB or more
OS: Windows 11 (64bit) or higher
VIDEO CARD: No specific requirements
FREE DISK SPACE: more than 100 GB

CPU: Modern 16-core or higher CPU
Intel i9-7960 – Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX or higher
RAM: 64-128 GB
OS: Windows 10 (64bit) or higher
VIDEO CARD: No specific requirements
FREE DISK SPACE: more than 500GB