Street Trees and Thermal Comfort
Assessing how street trees influence urban cooling, outdoor heat stress, and near-surface meteorology in city environments.
PhD Researcher - Empa and ETH Zurich
Kutay Donmez
I work on urban climate modelling, street trees, and human thermal comfort, with a focus on improving how numerical weather and climate models represent urban vegetation and atmosphere-surface exchange.
- Focus Urban canopy modelling, thermal comfort, street trees
- Models ICON, TERRA_URB, BEP-Tree, COSMO, WRF
- Tools Python, Xarray, Pandas, GIS, scientific visualization
Current Work
Research at the intersection of urban climate, model development, and practical climate-data workflows.
Urban Canopy Modelling
Working with ICON, TERRA_URB, and BEP-Tree to improve the representation of urban morphology, vegetation, and exchange processes.
Urban Climate Evaluation
Evaluating the sensitivity of simulated urban climate to canopy parameters, material properties, and spatially varying urban data.
Scientific Computing
Building Python workflows for atmospheric datasets, model output analysis, visualization, and reproducible research.
Selected Projects
View all projects
UrbaNature
Urban vegetation, carbon, energy, and water-cycle feedbacks in city environments.
Climaturk
A climate-data platform for exploring atmospheric conditions and indices in Turkey.
Visjobs
A Python package for accessing atmospheric model and observation datasets through OpenDAP-based workflows.
Recent Publications
Full research listDonmez, K., Stagakis, S., Ponomarev, N., Schulz, J.-P., and Brunner, D. doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103018
Donmez, B., Donmez, K., Yuruk Sonuc, C., and Unal, Y. doi:10.1002/joc.8559