Urban Climate InteracTable: towards an immersive contextual data analysis platform to visualize and explore urban heat
Journal article, 2026
Extreme weather events, such as heat waves, are occurring more frequently and intensively, imposing new climate-adaptation demands on municipal planning. We conducted a design study across the domains of urban planning and urban climate research, and identified challenges regarding a lack of heat-related information in current planning processes, and the high complexity of effective climate data representation. To address these challenges, and so enhance the information flow between these domains, we developed Urban Climate InteracTable, an immersive interface that supports exploratory analysis of spatio-temporal climate simulation data integrated with an urban environment representation. We describe several use cases in which this interface can be utilized to assist with planning-related decision processes and to communicate heat-related phenomena. We present the feedback obtained from our collaborating domain experts and relevant external experts, and reflect on our experiences throughout the design study. From this, we offer insights for future research.
Climate adaptation
Visualization
Urban analytics
Immersive analytics
Climate modelling
Design study
Urban heat
Author
Nico Reski
Linköping University
Carlo Navarra
Linköping University
Lotten Wiréhn
Linköping University
Tina Simone Neset
Linköping University
Aris Alissandrakis
Linnaeus University
University of Gothenburg
Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Interaction Design and Software Engineering
Aitor Aldama Campino
SMHI
Fuxing Wang
SMHI
Isabel Ribeiro
SMHI
Jorge H. Amorim
SMHI
Andreas Kerren
Linköping University
Linnaeus University
Katerina Vrotsou
Linköping University
Virtual Reality
1359-4338 (ISSN) 14349957 (eISSN)
Vol. 30 1 7Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Information Systems
Climate Science
DOI
10.1007/s10055-025-01264-4