Dr Ting Sun awarded a UCL Open Source Software Sustainability grant

Open source software empowers modern research and scholarship by facilitating new knowledge generation, as well as improving open research. To improve the long-term sustainability of research software, the UCL Open Source Software Sustainability scheme is launched this year by funding community-driven development and maintenance activities.

Dr Ting Sun, Lecturer in Climate and Meteorological Hazard Risks and the lead developer of SuPy, said he was excited to win the grant, which “will not only enable the sustainable development of SuPy but also pump-prime my research on urban climate at UCL in my new role—this will generate long-term value in my career”. Beyond the software development, he envisioned that “together with the vibrant urban research community of UCL, SuPy, as a gateway to urban climate research, can also help raise the awareness of climate change and urban sustainability among the UCL community in resonance with the UCL grand challenge—sustainable cities”.

Feedback on his application highlighted this will “enhance the existing strength of UCL in urban climate research” and “enable further consolidation and growth to UCL’s research capabilities”.

SuPy (Sun and Grimmond, 2019) is an open-source Python package built upon a state-of-the-art urban climate model SUEWS (Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme; Järvi et al., 2011, 2014; Ward et al., 2016) with many enhancements (e.g., climate data retrieval, result analysis, etc.) aimed at streamlining simulation of urban climate processes (e.g., urban heat islands, anthropogenic emission, etc.). Since its first release in 2019, SuPy has been gaining popularity in the urban climate community with various applications (e.g. research projects, module teaching, engineering consulting, etc.)—notably, SuPy has been incorporated into a popular QGIS urban climate plugin UMEP as a key component for urban energy balance calculations.