The Impacts from Vertical Climate Distribution on Energy Consumption of High-Rise Urban Blocks—The Case from Xi’an, China

The number of high-rise buildings was kept increasing in cities. When estimating the energy demand of high-rise buildings and urban blocks, taking the effect of urban heat islands but not the vertical meteorological patterns into account may bring deviations. We quantified this deviation in this paper. First, the vertical air temperature and wind profiles of Xi’an city were constructed with the measured data. The winter (summer) urban air temperature gradient reached 0.8 °C(0.1 °C)/90 m in the nighttime and − 0.7 °C(− 1.3 °C)/90 m in the daytime. The urban wind speed gradient was 0.8 m/s(0.4 m/s)/90 m in winter (summer). The meteorological data gradient of cities is smaller than that of suburbs. Second, we proposed 42 representative high-rise urban block models for energy simulation. The results showed that ignoring the vertical urban meteorological pattern may cause the underestimation of the heating load of urban blocks by 26% and the overestimation of the cooling load by 2%. This paper offered a reference for estimating the energy demand of the high-rise urban blocks.