Trend analysis of building height and total floor space in Beijing, China using ICESat/GLAS data

Abstract

GLA14, one of the products of the spaceborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), provides six Gaussian decomposition waveforms that represent different vertical layers of the ground target in a laser spot. In this article, we have extracted the relative height of ground targets from peak positions of the GLAS waveform, carried out the field validations, analysed the trend of building height in Beijing and then multiplied the building height and the percentage of building area within a pixel of the land-use/land-cover classification map to get the annual change of total floor space of buildings in Beijing. Based on the total floor space of buildings (TFSB) released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC), we have established a linear regression model between the GLAS-estimated total floor space in Beijing and the data provided by NBSC. The results show that the building height and (TFSB) in Beijing increased from 2003 to 2008. The method proposed in this article expands research on urban change from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional space to improve research accuracy, and is complementary to current remote-sensing methods.