The WUDAPT Approach Toward Supporting Multiscale Fit for the Purpose of Intraurban Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Applications

The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to generate consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support a wide range of “fit for purpose” urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality analyses and modeling on a variety of scales. The latest developments are designed to generate grid specific sets of form, fabric (material content) and functions-urban canopy parameters (FFF-UCPs) of building environments, supporting, augmenting and improving RANS-MOST boundary layer formulations soas to more aptly simulate weather and climate effects based on extreme complexities in morphological features and surface heterogeneities that characterize urban areas. This provides the foundation for model applications and analyses studies of intra-urban scale risks and impacts on air quality, exacerbated heating, flooding, comfort, anthropogenic heating, GHG emissions and urban planning requirements. The recent approaches are based on new methodological developments capable of generating canopy attributes of morphological form, material composition and activity, and when implemented will augment the table lookup range of values approach associated with WUDAPT Level 0, based on Local Climate Zones (LCZs). The first of these focus on the WUDAPT Digital Synthetic City (DSC) Tool that makes possible and feasible a practical and consistent means to generate and codify UCPs at any desired grid mesh scale for worldwide scope and coverage. The second outlines the innovative and emerging building tool methodological approach to generate information on building materials and their energy usage based on efforts that incorporate crowdsourcing geotagged photo taking activities linking and utilizing building dictionaries into a typological framework by incorporating Artificial Intelligence and deep machine learning NN techniques. Testbeds for more than 30 cities provide the means to (a) evaluate the universality of these prototypic methodologies against actual building data and (b) perform proof of concept, modeling application demonstrations such as those listed above. From this, we anticipate our Portal to host operational links making possible utility of the generated data and the running of various modeling applications and analyses studies.