WUDAPT: An Urban Weather, Climate, and Environmental Modeling Infrastructure for the Anthropocene
Jason Ching,Gerald Mills,Benjamin Bechtel,Linda See,Johannes J. Feddema,Xuemei Wang,Chao Ren,Oscar Brousse,Alberto Martilli,Marina Neophytou,Petros Mouzourides,Iain D. Stewart,Adel Hanna,Edward Ng,Michael Foley,P. Alexander,Daniel G. Aliaga,Dev Niyogi,Anamika Shreevastava,P. Bhalachandran,V. Masson,Julia Hidalgo,Jimmy Chi Hung Fung,Maria de Fátima Andrade,Alexander Baklanov,W. Dai,G. Milcinski,Matthias Demuzere,Nathaniel A. Brunsell,Martino Pesaresi,Shiguang Miao,Q. Mu,Fei Chen,N.E. Theeuwes +33 more
TLDR
The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) as mentioned in this paper is an international community-based initiative to acquire and disseminate climate relevant data on the physical geographies of cities for modeling and analysis purposes.Abstract:
The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is an international community-based initiative to acquire and disseminate climate relevant data on the physical geographies of cities for modeling and analysis purposes. The current lacuna of globally consistent information on cities is a major impediment to urban climate science toward informing and developing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies at urban scales. WUDAPT consists of a database and a portal system; its database is structured into a hierarchy representing different levels of detail, and the data are acquired using innovative protocols that utilize crowdsourcing approaches, Geowiki tools, freely accessible data, and building typology archetypes. The base level of information (L0) consists of local climate zone (LCZ) maps of cities; each LCZ category is associated with a range of values for model-relevant surface descriptors (roughness, impervious surface cover, roof area, building heights, etc.). Levels 1 (L1) and 2 (L2) will provide specific intra-urban values for other relevant descriptors at greater precision, such as data morphological forms, material composition data, and energy usage. This article describes the status of the WUDAPT project and demonstrates its potential value using observations and models. As a community-based project, other researchers are encouraged to participate to help create a global urban database of value to urban climate scientists.read more
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Urban Multi-scale Environmental Predictor (UMEP)
Fredrik Lindberg,C. S. B. Grimmond,Andrew Gabey,Bei Huang,Christoph W. Kent,Ting Sun,N.E. Theeuwes,Leena Jrvi,Helen C. Ward,I. Capel-Timms,Yuanyong Chang,Per Jonsson,Niklas Krave,Dongwei Liu,David Meyer,K. Frans G. Olofson,Jianguo Tan,Dag Wstberg,Lingbo Xue,Zhe Zhang +19 more
TL;DR: Applications are presented to illustrate UMEP's potential in the identification of heat waves and cold waves; the effect of green infrastructure on runoff; the effects of buildings on human thermal stress; solar energy production; and the impact of human activities on heat emissions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Generating WUDAPT Level 0 data – Current status of production and evaluation
Benjamin Bechtel,Paul J. Alexander,Christoph Beck,Jürgen Böhner,Oscar Brousse,Jason Ching,Matthias Demuzere,Cidália Costa Fonte,Tamás Gál,Julia Hidalgo,Peter Hoffmann,Ariane Middel,Gerald Mills,Chao Ren,Linda See,Panagiotis Sismanidis,Marie-Leen Verdonck,Guang Xu,Yong Xu +18 more
TL;DR: The protocol by which LCZ maps generated by different members of the community are produced and evaluated is outlined, which supports the assumption that the current level 0 products are already of sufficient quality for certain applications.
Journal ArticleDOI
SUHI analysis using Local Climate Zones—A comparison of 50 cities
Benjamin Bechtel,Matthias Demuzere,Matthias Demuzere,Gerald Mills,Wenfeng Zhan,Panagiotis Sismanidis,Christopher Small,James A. Voogt +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the suitability of the Local Climate Zones (LCZ) scheme for surface urban heat islands (SUHI) studies based on 50 cities from across the globe is investigated.
Journal ArticleDOI
Urban form and composition of street canyons: A human-centric big data and deep learning approach
TL;DR: An innovative big data approach to derive street-level morphology and urban feature composition as experienced by a pedestrian from Google Street View (GSV) imagery is developed and constitutes an important step towards building a global morphological database to describe the form and composition of cities from a human-centric perspective.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mapping Europe into local climate zones.
Matthias Demuzere,Matthias Demuzere,Benjamin Bechtel,Benjamin Bechtel,Ariane Middel,Gerald Mills +5 more
TL;DR: A European database that has a particular focus on characterising urbanised landscapes is presented, derived using tools and techniques developed as part of the WUDAPT project, which has the goal of acquiring and disseminating climate-relevant information on cities worldwide.
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