Evaluating the performance of a novel WUDAPT averaging technique to define urban morphology with mesoscale models

Zonato, Andrea; Martilli, Alberto; Sabatino, Silvana Di; Zardi, Dino; Giovannini, Lorenzo

doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2020.100584

Cited by 51 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…For all other UCPs, an ISA-weighted mean is applied, in order to conserve the city's characteristics after remapping to coarser resolution [66]. This procedure is in line with Zonato et al [34], who have found that a weighted average interpolation performs better than the majority approach that was originally developed in W2W [33].…”

Section: Lcz-based Urban Canopy Parametersmentioning

confidence: 97%

Impact of Urban Canopy Parameters on a Megacity’s Modelled Thermal Environment

2020

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Urban canopy parameters (UCPs) are essential in order to accurately model the complex interplay between urban areas and their environment. This study compares three different approaches to define the UCPs for Moscow (Russia), using the COSMO numerical weather prediction and climate model coupled to TERRA_URB urban parameterization. In addition to the default urban description based on the global datasets and hard-coded constants (1), we present a protocol to define the required UCPs based on Local Climate Zones (LCZs) (2) and further compare it with a reference UCP dataset, assembled from OpenStreetMap data, recent global land cover data and other satellite imagery (3). The test simulations are conducted for contrasting summer and winter conditions and are evaluated against a dense network of in-situ observations. For the summer period, advanced approaches (2) and (3) show almost similar performance and provide noticeable improvements with respect to default urban description (1). Additional improvements are obtained when using spatially varying urban thermal parameters instead of the hard-coded constants. The LCZ-based approach worsens model performance for winter however, due to the underestimation of the anthropogenic heat flux (AHF). These results confirm the potential of LCZs in providing internationally consistent urban data for weather and climate modelling applications, as well as supplementing more comprehensive approaches. Yet our results also underline the continued need to improve the description of built-up and impervious areas and the AHF in urban parameterizations.

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Section: Lcz-based Urban Canopy Parametersmentioning

confidence: 97%

Impact of Urban Canopy Parameters on a Megacity’s Modelled Thermal Environment

2020

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“…This development will in addition accelerate the key aim of WUDAPT, that is "to capture consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality modeling" (Ching et al, 2018(Ching et al, , 2019. Examples of modeling systems currently using LCZ information are the Surface Urban Energy and Water Balance Scheme (SUEWS, Alexander et al, 2016), ENVI-met (Bande et al, 2020), the urban multi-scale environmental predictor (UMEP, Lindberg et al, 2018), MUKLIMO_3 (Bokwa et al, 2019;Gál et al, 2021), COSMO-CLM and the WUDAPT-TO-COSMO tool (Wouters et al, 2016;Brousse et al, 2019Brousse et al, , 2020bVarentsov et al, 2020), and the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF, Brousse et al, 2016;Hammerberg et al, 2018;Wong et al, 2019;Patel et al, 2020;Zonato et al, 2020). While WRF currently uses the WUDAPT-to-WRF tool to ingest LCZ information (Brousse et al, 2016), its next release expected in spring 2021 should offer this compatibility by default (A. Zonato, personal communication).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps

Demuzere

Kittner

Bechtel

2021

Front. Environ. Sci.

156

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Since their introduction in 2012, Local Climate Zones (LCZs) emerged as a new standard for characterizing urban landscapes, providing a holistic classification approach that takes into account micro-scale land-cover and associated physical properties. In 2015, as part of the community-based World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project, a protocol was developed that enables the mapping of cities into LCZs, using freely available data and software packages, yet performed on local computing facilities. The LCZ Generator described here further simplifies this process, providing an online platform that maps a city of interest into LCZs, solely expecting a valid training area file and some metadata as input. The web application (available at https://lcz-generator.rub.de) integrates the state-of-the-art of LCZ mapping, and simultaneously provides an automated accuracy assessment, training data derivatives, and a novel approach to identify suspicious training areas. As this contribution explains all front- and back-end procedures, databases, and underlying datasets in detail, it serves as the primary “User Guide” for this web application. We anticipate this development will significantly ease the workflow of researchers and practitioners interested in using the LCZ framework for a variety of urban-induced human and environmental impacts. In addition, this development will ease the accessibility and dissemination of maps and their metadata.

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“…However, authors suggest further possible improvements, in particular in terms of LCZs extrapolation and transferability to different contexts from the ones where they were firstly derived (Kaloustian et al 2017 [26]). Even if WUDAPT available dataset allows a good urban surface characterization that leads to appreciable modelling results and shows adaptability (e.g., in terms of parameters values interpolation, see Zonato et al 2020 [27]), a site-specific urban characterization still may help for the urban surface classification purpose. In fact, to obtain the so-called Level 0 data, the individuation of TAs is based on the capability of local community to well recognize the main features of the urban environment into TAs: the following process of classification of other site areas is strongly influenced by this first step.…”

Section: State Of the Art And Targetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Street Graph-Based Morphometric Characterization of Two Large Urban Areas

et al. 2021

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Urban microclimate modelling, both numerical and in the laboratory, has strong implications in many relevant health and life-style management issues e.g., in studies for assessment and forecast of air quality (for both outdoor and, as boundary conditions, indoor investigations), for thermometric trend analysis in urban zones, in cultural heritage preservation, etc. Moreover, the study of urban microclimate modelling is largely promoted and encouraged by international institutions for its implication in human health protection. In the present work, we propose and discuss an adaptive street graph-based method aimed at automatically computing the geometrical parameters adopted in atmospheric turbulent flow modelling. This method has been applied to two real cases, the Italian cities of Rome and Cagliari, and its results has been compared with the ones from traditional methods based on regular grids. Results show that the proposed method leads to a more accurate determination of the urban canyon parameters (Canyon Aspect Ratio and Building Aspect Ratio) and morphometric parameters (Planar Area Index and Frontal Area Index) compared to traditional regular grid-based methods, at least for the tested cases. Further investigations on a larger number of different urban contexts are planned to thoroughly test and validate the proposed algorithm.

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Evaluating the performance of a novel WUDAPT averaging technique to define urban morphology with mesoscale models

Cited by 51 publications

References 30 publications

Impact of Urban Canopy Parameters on a Megacity’s Modelled Thermal Environment

Impact of Urban Canopy Parameters on a Megacity’s Modelled Thermal Environment

LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps

A Street Graph-Based Morphometric Characterization of Two Large Urban Areas

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