Database features of the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (NUDAPT)

This paper describes the features of the databases included in the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (NUDAPT) and discusses issues resolved to create spatial and format consistency. The Houston prototype of NUDAPT contains three-dimensional building, derived gridded urban canopy parameters (UCPs), derived micrometerological physical characteristics, land use/cover, population, and anthropogenic heating databases. These form the core databases recommended for future NUDAPT cities with additional ancillary datasets to be added as NUDAPT expands. The three-dimensional building dataset contains more than 650,000 building footprints in shapefile format with height attributes. This database covers more than 1600 km² of the Houston metropolitan area. The micrometeorological database is derived from the building database and aerial images to represent all morphology types over a smaller area with high resolution (50 m) and high-fidelity data. The UCP database provides 250-m and 1-km resolution coverage of between 13 and 40 UCPs. The 250-m resolution database covers an area of 1600 km² and the 1-km resolution covers Harris County. The population database created at the Los Alamos National Laboratory includes day-night-worker categories at 250-m resolution for the entire United States, although only the Houston area is included in NUDAPT at this time. The anthropogenic heating database provides estimates of hourly anthropogenic heat emission in each of two seasons. These estimates are derived from vehicle travel data and building-scale hourly energy consumption estimates derived for prototypical buildings and facilities in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. Land use/cover databases from the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and a specialized database from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality are included. Additional details of these datasets and how they relate to atmospheric transport and dispersion modeling at a range of scales will be presented. Specific problems encountered while integrating these disparate databases into NUDAPT will also be presented.