National urban database and access portal tools (NUDAPT), a project overview

Based on the need for advanced treatments of high resolution urban morphological features into meteorological, dispersion, air quality and human exposure modeling systems for future urban applications, a new project was launched called the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT). NUDAPT is sponsored by the USEPA and involves collaborations and contributions from many groups including federal and state agencies and from private and academic institutions here and in other countries. It is designed to produce and provide gridded fields of urban canopy parameterizations for various new and advanced descriptions of model physics to improve urban simulations given the availability of new high-resolution data of urban buildings and land usage. Additionally, ancillary information such as gridded population, energy usage, traffic is incorporated were available so as to encourage and facilitate linkages to human exposure models. An important core-design feature is the utilization of web portal technology to enable NUDAPT to be a “Community” based system. This web-based portal technology will facilitate data retrievals and handling based on data federation concepts. This presentation provides an overview of NUDAPT and illustrative examples derived from one of its Prototype urban area, Houston TX.