2.1
HIGH RESOLUTION INVENTORYING OF URBAN MORPHOLOGY TO SUPPORT WIND FLOW MODELING- PROGRESS AND PROSPECT

Richard Ellefsen, San Jose State Univ, San Jose, CA

Reported here is progress on inventorying morphological attributes of urban terrain. High resolution, raster-based inventories, completed to date for four US and two foreign urban metropolitan areas, have been used in support of wind flow modeling efforts. Data have been produced on: building density, building height, building orientation, roof pitch (flat or pitched), roof reflectivity, amount and reflectivity of impervious surfaces, and measurements of tree canopy and other vegetation. As many as 17 data items have been reported by one hectare (100m x 100m) cells, addressed by Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates. Inventories have been completed for the metropolitan areas (corporate cities and out to the rural periphery) of: (1) St. Louis, MO (covering an area of 886 square kilometers), Sacramento, CA (875 square kilometers), Edgewood, MD (190 square kilometers), Uppsala, sweden (225 square kilometers), and El Paso/Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (1120 square kilometers). Efforts are underway to improve the inventorying method to make it faster and more cost efficient in response to current demand by both civil and defense agencies to conduct wind flow modeling for both domestic and foreign urban areas. Experimentation is exploring several levels of resolution (400 x 400m, 200 x 200m, 100 x 100m, 50 x 50m, and 25 x 25m) and means of sampling of urban terrain to derive optimual levels of generalization. Resolutions must adequately portray the complexity and fine grain of urban terrain and yet be low cost and with quick turn-around time. The sampling method described here consists of: (1) manual determination of Urban Terrain Zones (UTZs) from visual satellite data; (2) assigning attributes for each type of urban terrain as derived from mensuration of sample air photographs; (3) application of these attributes to all UTZs; and (4) conversion of polygonal data to raster cells for ready application in wind models.

The Second Symposium on Urban Environment