부산대학교 도서관

The universal thermal climate index (UTCI) is a crucial temperature index for describing human thermal comfort. With the continuous advancement of Earth observation technologies, it has become feasible to monitor hourly global UTCI at kilometer-level resolution. However, the computational efficiency of UTCI calculations limits the production and application of UTCI, particularly time-series UTCI application at fine resolution. To address the abovementioned issue, this letter proposes a CUDA UTCI (CUTCI) method based on the graphics processing unit (GPU). CUTCI leverages the parallel computing capabilities of GPUs and kernel fusion techniques to improve parallelization and mitigate overhead during calculation. Experimental results demonstrated that, in comparison to operational UTCI and thermofeel UTCI, CUTCI significantly improved computational efficiency by over 250 times and 17 times, respectively. The production of a single-period global UTCI at 0.1° resolution consumed less than 0.2 s. Experimental results revealed that CUTCI holds practical value in supporting real-time UTCI analysis and historical big data analysis over long-time series.