Metropolitan Climate Dashboard

Cities run warmer than the countryside around them — the urban heat island effect. This simulator lays out a square grid split into a dense city core and a sparser rural ring, gives every cell a material (asphalt, roof, or greenery) with its own albedo and thermal mass, and integrates each cell's surface temperature against a day/night solar cycle. Raise building density and the city core's dark, high-mass surfaces absorb more heat and shed it more slowly; raise green cover and the same area behaves more like the rural baseline. Scrub time of day to watch the heat island effect swell after sunset, when the city is still radiating stored heat that the surrounding land has already lost.