It is important to alleviate the “heat island effect” in urban areas, especially tropical cities. Microclimate is normally affected by the urban morphology parameters. The objective of this work is to investigate the correlation between air temperature variations and urban morphology parameters in tropical cities. Field measurement was carried out to record the air temperature at 27 points within an 8 km² urban area continuously in Singapore for one year. Geographical information system was applied to extract the urban morphology parameters. Generally, the maximum and minimum air temperature spatial differences in the study area ranged from 3.2 to 6.5 °C, indicating the significant effects of urban morphology on the air temperatures. Based on the fitting results of created multilinear regression models, parametric study has been performed to investigate the specific effects of urban morphology parameters on air temperatures. This work has proposed a much more precise regression model to predict the air temperature with various urban morphology parameters. In addition, meaningful value of reference has been offered for urban planners and landscape designers to effectively control the air temperature in tropical cities such as Singapore.

Recently, the concept of a digital twin for the built environment has received significant attention due to its potential benefits to urban planners, engineers, and designers. The development of tools that aid in integrating real-world physical systems with digital capabilities is essential for advancing digital twin technology. In this work, we present one such digital twin tool that integrates the longitudinal thermal envelope data of buildings on the campus of the National University of Singapore with a virtual 3D model. Thermal images of the buildings were captured using a neighborhood-scale infrared observatory for a few months. The temperature profile of one of the buildings was extracted and mapped on the virtual 3D model. The digital twin model is developed in the deck.gl platform. This is one of the few studies on developing a dynamic digital twin incorporating temporally and spatially varying urban-scale 2D temperature envelope data with the virtual 3D model. The digital twin platform can study the microclimate and help urban planners identify the building elements contributing to the urban heat island (UHI) effect at the neighborhood scale.