Planning for Cooler Cities: A Multimodal AI Framework for Predicting and Mitigating Urban Heat Stress through Urban Landscape Transformation

Abstract

As extreme heat events intensify due to climate change and urbanization, cities face increasing challenges in mitigating outdoor heat stress. While traditional physical models such as SOLWEIG and ENVI-met provide detailed assessments of human-perceived heat exposure, their computational demands limit scalability for city-wide planning. In this study, we propose GSM-UTCI, a multimodal deep learning framework designed to predict daytime average Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) at 1-meter hyperlocal resolution. The model fuses surface morphology (nDSM), high-resolution land cover data, and hourly meteorological conditions using a feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) architecture that dynamically conditions spatial features on atmospheric context. Trained on SOLWEIG-derived UTCI maps, GSM-UTCI achieves near-physical accuracy, with an R2 of 0.9151 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.41°C, while reducing inference time from hours to under five minutes for an entire city. To demonstrate its planning relevance, we apply GSM-UTCI to simulate systematic landscape transformation scenarios in Philadelphia, replacing bare earth, grass, and impervious surfaces with tree canopy. Results show spatially heterogeneous but consistently strong cooling effects, with impervious-to-tree conversion producing the highest aggregated benefit (-4.18°C average change in UTCI across 270.7 km2). Tract-level bivariate analysis further reveals strong alignment between thermal reduction potential and land cover proportions. These findings underscore the utility of GSM-UTCI as a scalable, fine-grained decision support tool for urban climate adaptation, enabling scenario-based evaluation of greening strategies across diverse urban environments.