The WUDAPT Framework to Generate Urban Morphology, Material Composition and Anthropogenic Activity Data for Modeling

The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools or WUDAPT is strategically designed, multi-level, universally consistent, and community-based approach that describes the physical geography of cities capturing information of urban form, material content and function (energy demand) for climate studies and model applications.  These data all impact the flow and structural aspects of the urban canopy throughout the city.    In WUDAPT, Level 0, the basic structure of urban areas are characterized using the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme of Stewart and Oke and a methodology based on readily available Landsat imagery and the expertise of urban experts.  For each LCZ there is an associated table providing nominal ranges and representative values of urban canopy parameters (UCP) that capture essential aspects of urban form and functions that regulate its microclimate.  More than 100 cities are currently in Level “0” is now available for use (www.wudapt.org) and Mills et al, 2017); additional cities will be generated by community involvement given the establishment of a common protocol.  In this presentation we describe the developments and progress towards WUDAPT level 1 and 2 (W12).  The objective of Level 1 is to generate specific parameter values for running the suite of community-based environmental models needing morphological forms, material composition data and anthropogenic functions such as energy usage for each and all LCZs.  At these levels, model uncertainties associated with the range of values from Level “0” tables are eliminated.  Level 2 addresses needs for modeling data needs for advanced applications.  For this, we review the conceptual context, describe and outline the elements of the general approach, and indicate progress to date on methodology development, and issues, as well as preliminary results.  In concept and design W12 require the methodology and protocol to adopt the principles established for Level 0: e.g., the utilization of freely available data, a methodology consistently applied for all the world’s cities and implementable by a community of urban experts.  For this initial effort, we explore using various data inputs including aerial imagery and satellite based data, the incorporating of building typology archetypes, and crowdsourcing facilitation with appropriate Geowiki tools.  The paradigm being followed is in two stages, a data gathering, crowdsourcing component and data processing system based on algorithms and tools designed to generate the desired parameter fields. We envision using a bootstrap approach constraining the methodology to mimic high quality data sets for urban area such as for Paris, Toulouse, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Houston. We explore generating W12 for LCZ and other optional spatial delimiters such as city blocks and grid meshes of different sizes to support the needs of a variety of models.