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1. Pathway using WUDAPT's Digital Synthetic City tool towards generating urban canopy parameters for multi-scale urban atmospheric modeling

   Ching, J; Aliaga, D; Mills, G; Masson, V; See, L; Neophytou, M; Middel, A; Baklanov, A; Ren, C; Ng, E; et al (June 2019, Urban climate)

   The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to capture consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality modeling. These data are provided as urban canopy parameters (UCPs) as used by weather, climate and air quality models to simulate the effects of urban surfaces on the overlying atmosphere. Information is stored with different levels of detail (LOD). With higher LOD greater spatial precision is provided. At the lowest LOD, Local Climate Zones (LCZ) with nominal UCP ranges is provided (order 100 m or more). To describe the spatial heterogeneity present in cities with great specificity at different urban scales we introduce the Digital Synthetic City (DSC) tool to generate UCPs at any desired scale meeting the fit-for-purpose goal of WUDAPT. 3D building and road elements of entire city landscapes are simulated based on readily available data. Comparisons with real-world urban data are very encouraging. It is customized (C-DSC) to incorporate each city's unique building morphologies based on unique types, variations and spatial distribution of building typologies, architecture features, construction materials and distribution of green and pervious surfaces. The C-DSC uses crowdsourcing methods and sampling within city Testbeds from around the world. UCP data can be computed from synthetic images at selected grid sizes and stored such that the coded string provides UCP values for individual grid cells. 

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2. Detailed height mapping of trees and buildings (HiTAB) in Chicago and its implications to urban climate studies

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad661a  

   Li, Peiyuan; Sharma, Ashish (August 2024, Environmental Research Letters)

   Abstract The vertical dimensions of urban morphology, specifically the heights of trees and buildings, exert significant influence on wind flow fields in urban street canyons and the thermal environment of the urban fabric, subsequently affecting the microclimate, noise levels, and air quality. Despite their importance, these critical attributes are less commonly available and rarely utilized in urban climate models compared to planar land use and land cover data. In this study, we explicitly mapped theheight oftreesandbuildings (HiTAB) across the city of Chicago at 1 m spatial resolution using a data fusion approach. This approach integrates high-precision light detection and ranging (LiDAR) cloud point data, building footprint inventory, and multi-band satellite images. Specifically, the digital terrain and surface models were first created from the LiDAR dataset to calculate the height of surface objects, while the rest of the datasets were used to delineate trees and buildings. We validated the derived height information against the existing building database in downtown Chicago and the Meter-scale Urban Land Cover map from the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively. The co-investigation on trees and building heights offers a valuable initiative in the effort to inform urban land surface parameterizations using real-world data. Given their high spatial resolution, the height maps can be adopted in physical-based and data-driven urban models to achieve higher resolution and accuracy while lowering uncertainties. Moreover, our method can be extended to other urban regions, benefiting from the growing availability of high-resolution urban informatics globally. Collectively, these datasets can substantially contribute to future studies on hyper-local weather dynamics, urban heterogeneity, morphology, and planning, providing a more comprehensive understanding of urban environments. 

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3. A New Methodology to Assess Building Integrated Roof Top Photovoltaic Installations at City Scales: The Tropical Coastal City Case

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4045347  

   Pokhrel, Rabindra; Walker, Andy; González, Jorge E. (February 2020, ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities)

   Abstract As a consequence of the warm and humid climate of tropical coastal regions, there is high energy demand year-round due to air conditioning to maintain indoor comfort levels. Past and current practices are focused on mitigating peak cooling demands by improving heat balances by using efficient building envelope technologies, passive systems, and demand side management strategies. In this study, we explore city-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) planning integrating information on climate, building parameters and energy models, and electrical system performance, with added benefits for the tropical coastal city of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Energy balance on normal roof, flush-mounted PV roof, and tilted PV roof are used to determine PV power generation, air, and roof surface temperatures. To scale up the application to the whole city, we use the urbanized version of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model with the building effect parameterization (BEP) and the building energy model (BEM). The city topology is represented by the World Urban Database Access Portal Tool (WUDAPT), local climate zones (LCZs) for urban landscapes. The modeled peak roof temperature is maximum for normal roof conditions and minimum when inclined PV is installed on a roof. These trends are followed by the building air conditioning (AC) demand from urbanized WRF, maximum for normal roof and minimum for inclined roof-mounted PV. The net result is a reduced daytime Urban Heat Island (UHI) for horizontal and inclined PV roof and increased nighttime UHI for the horizontal PV roof as compared with the normal roof. The ratio between coincident AC demand and PV production for the entire metropolitan region is further analyzed reaching 20% for compact low rise and open low rise buildings due to adequate roof area but reaches almost 100% for compact high rise and compact midrise buildings class, respectively. 

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4. Design and Deployment of Photo2Building: A Cloud-based Procedural Modeling Tool as a Service

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3311790.3396670  

   Bhatt, M.; Kalyanam, R.; Nishida, G.; He, L.; May, C.; Niyogi, D.; Aliaga, D. (July 2020, PEARC '20: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   We present a Photo2Building tool to create a plausible 3D model of a building from only a single photograph. Our tool is based on a prior desktop version which, as described in this paper, is converted into a client-server model, with job queuing, web-page support, and support of concurrent usage. The reported cloud-based web-accessible tool can reconstruct a building in 40 seconds on average and costing only 0.60 USD with current pricing. This provides for an extremely scalable and possibly widespread tool for creating building models for use in urban design and planning applications. With the growing impact of rapid urbanization on weather and climate and resource availability, access to such a service is expected to help a wide variety of users such as city planners, urban meteorologists worldwide in the quest to improved prediction of urban weather and designing climate-resilient cities of the future. 

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5. Impact of urban parameterization and integration of WUDAPT on the severe convection

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s43762-022-00071-w  

   Nadimpalli, Raghu; Patel, Pratiman; Mohanty, U. C.; Attri, S. D.; Niyogi, Dev (December 2022, Computational Urban Science)

   Abstract Amplified rates of urban convective systems pose a severe peril to the life and property of the inhabitants over urban regions, requiring a reliable urban weather forecasting system. However, the city scale's accurate rainfall forecast has constantly been a challenge, as they are significantly affected by land use/ land cover changes (LULCC). Therefore, an attempt has been made to improve the forecast of the severe convective event by employing the comprehensive urban LULC map using Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification from the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) over the tropical city of Bhubaneswar in the eastern coast of India. These LCZs denote specific land cover classes based on urban morphology characteristics. It can be used in the Advanced Research version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (ARW) model, which also encapsulates the Building Effect Parameterization (BEP) scheme. The BEP scheme considers the buildings' 3D structure and allows complex land–atmosphere interaction for an urban area. The temple city Bhubaneswar, the capital of eastern state Odisha, possesses significant rapid urbanization during the recent decade. The LCZs are generated at 500 m grids using supervised classification and are ingested into the ARW model. Two different LULC dataset, i.e., Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and WUDAPT derived LCZs and initial, and boundary conditions from NCEP GFS 6-h interval are used for two pre-monsoon severe convective events of the year 2016. The results from WUDAPT based LCZ have shown an improvement in spatial variability and reduction in overall BIAS over MODIS LULC experiments. The WUDAPT based LCZ map enhances high-resolution forecast from ARW by incorporating the details of building height, terrain roughness, and urban fraction. 

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