Objectives of the service
Cities worldwide face growing climate-resilience challenges. While future urban modeling is valuable, direct engagement with municipal and private stakeholders revealed a more urgent need: continuous, accurate, real-time environmental monitoring. The SCULPT project addresses this by automating the complex integration of satellite data into Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations.
By delivering a validated service architecture, SCULPT's satellite-ingestion technology is being integrated directly into CLARA (City-Level Adaptive Resilience Applications), a prototype mobile application and robust simulation engine that currently powers the BrusAir platform. This upgrades CLARA into a comprehensive digital twin capable of tracking air quality, wind, and thermal comfort at the street level.
By transforming complex space data into an accessible, near real-time monitoring tool, the service empowers city officials, private businesses, and everyday citizens with actionable daily insights. Furthermore, interactive simulation capabilities for urban climate adaptation developed under our urban microclimate adaptation tool (UMAT) will be added in a later development phase. This will enable users to actively design and test strategies for more resilient, sustainable urban environments.
Users and their needs
The target market comprises three segments sharing an immediate need for accessible, near real-time urban environmental monitoring: public administrations (B2G), private businesses (B2B), and citizens (B2C). Due to budget constraints, local authorities struggle with the high costs of expanding traditional sensor networks. For daily operations and emergency responses, they need cost-effective, accurate street-level data on urban heat islands and outdoor comfort seamlessly integrated into a platform. Furthermore, because interpreting complex environmental physics remains a major barrier, they explicitly require AI-assisted, natural-language reporting to translate monitoring data into actionable insights. In the private sector, businesses like real estate portals and dining aggregators need simple API integrations to translate environmental data into commercial value, offering their users local comfort and air quality scores. Finally, citizens require intuitive, daily guidance for safer active mobility routing and outdoor comfort planning.
Beyond these monitoring requirements, public and private sectors also possess a secondary long-term need: the ability to actively design and validate future climate adaptation strategies. To address this, users require dynamic simulation capabilities to test climate adaptation strategies during early design phases, an advanced capability that will be introduced as a future upgrade to the core monitoring platform.
Service/ system concept
During the SCULPT project we successfully developed a robust, cloud-based architecture specifically designed to bridge the gap between Earth Observation data and high-resolution Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The core technological achievement of SCULPT lies in its advanced data ingestion and spatial downscaling capabilities. The system autonomously retrieves Copernicus Sentinel satellite data and seamlessly merges it with precise, localized municipal datasets. SCULPT then serves as a powerful transformation layer, applying validated algorithms to downscale coarse satellite thermal readings into the exact, high-resolution boundary conditions required for street-level microclimate modeling.
Rather than deploying this technology as a standalone design tool, the SCULPT architecture is now directly integrated into CLARA to enable continuous, near real-time urban environmental monitoring. Within this combined ecosystem, SCULPT acts as the vital data engine, continuously feeding its refined boundary conditions into CLARA’s scalable Computational Fluid Dynamics infrastructure. CLARA then processes these inputs alongside physical ground sensor data to calculate detailed pedestrian wind exposure, pollution dispersion, and the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI). Finally, CLARA delivers these comprehensive insights through an accessible digital twin environment, utilizing a built-in AI assistant to translate the complex physics into plain-language, actionable daily reports for the users.
Space Added Value
SCULPT utilizes Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data to automatically generate and update detailed urban models. This approach provides a significant advantage over manual data collection, which is often time-consuming and inaccurate. Furthermore, the service integrates Sentinel-3 thermal data, applying a downscaling methodology with Sentinel-2 multispectral reflectance to refine surface temperature resolution from 1 km down to 20 meters. This high-resolution thermal intelligence is crucial for deriving accurate Mean Radiant Temperatures used in heat island assessments. Compared to current methods like ground thermometers or one-off consultancy studies, which are often too localized or expensive, SCULPT's automated pipeline offers superior spatial and temporal resolution. This creates a distinct value proposition against competitors by providing deeper, more accurate analyses through a streamlined, automated workflow.
Current Status
The SCULPT project successfully concluded in February 2026, achieving its core objective: automating the integration of satellite data into high-resolution urban microclimate simulations. During the Municipality of Ixelles pilot, we validated the space-data pipeline, proving its capability to generate precise boundary conditions for street-level modeling. The cloud-based simulation engine successfully processed these inputs to produce high-fidelity Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) and wind comfort maps, while the AI assistant seamlessly translated complex outputs into actionable reports.
Direct user engagement revealed that municipal and private stakeholders prioritize continuous, near real-time environmental monitoring over future urban design. This drove our strategic pivot: integrating SCULPT’s advanced data architecture directly into the CLARA platform to address daily operational needs.
Evolving from a proof-of-concept into a highly demanded market solution, SCULPT has secured official partnership interest from multiple organizations. We are now finalizing the scalable cloud architecture and preparing for a late 2026 ESA pilot. Once the core CLARA monitoring platform is fully scaled, interactive design capabilities for testing climate adaptation strategies, such as vegetation and albedo modifications, will be introduced as an advanced upgrade for global urban climate resilience.
Prime Contractor(s)
