Abstract
Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urban areas worldwide. The first step in developing WUDAPT is a description of cities based on the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme, which classifies natural and urban landscapes into categories based on climate-relevant surface properties. This methodology provides a culturally-neutral framework for collecting information about the internal physical structure of cities. Moreover, studies have shown that remote sensing data can be used for supervised LCZ mapping. Mapping of LCZs is complicated because similar LCZs in different regions have dissimilar spectral properties due to differences in vegetation, building materials and other variations in cultural and physical environmental factors. The WUDAPT protocol developed here provides an easy to understand workflow; uses freely available data and software; and can be applied by someone without specialist knowledge in spatial analysis or urban climate science. The paper also provides an example use of the WUDAPT project results.
Highlights
Consistent knowledge about cities and their internal structure is of high relevance for a number of reasons
We present and describe the methodology for deriving a culturally-neutral framework for classifying and delineating urban landscapes into a climatically relevant classification scheme using remote sensing data in combination with local expert-based knowledge and the concept of Local Climate Zones (LCZs)
Since the needed scales will likely span several orders of magnitude and not all use cases are previously known, an aggregation scheme should be part of the protocol and portal tool. This is far from trivial, because LCZs are only defined for a specific range of scales and the homogeneity criterion will unavoidably be violated if they are aggregated to coarser scales
Summary
Consistent knowledge about cities and their internal structure is of high relevance for a number of reasons. We discuss the appropriateness of LCZ mapping, the lessons learned from previous work and the requirements for implementation; the latter includes decisions on the urban features to be captured, training data, classifiers, and data availability Based on these considerations, we present a simple and objective mapping method that allows local experts (that is, those with knowledge of a given city) to participate and play an essential role in data collection; this places high demands on the standardization of the process as few local experts will have expertise in climate science, in building and urban studies, or in spatial methodologies (i.e., remote sensing, GIS, and image processing). The protocol must be comprised of a simple workflow with publicly available data that can be processed using freely available software by local operators
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