Mapping Cities Worldwide
- indotplace
- Dec 16, 2016
- 1 min read
Dec 15, 2016 • This morning at #AGU16, Dr. Johannes Feddema, a geographer and climatologist from the University of Victoria in Canada, gave a talk on the his work mapping cities around the world. Here’s what he told us about it:
Presentation Title The WUDAPT Project: Engaging a global community to map and characterize cities worldwide
What are the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT)? WUDAPT is a project that acquires, stores and disseminates spatial information on cities worldwide that is useful for climate research. It is distinguished by its use of consistent land cover classes called Local Climate Zones (LCZ), which are neighborhood scale areas derived from Landsat data. LCZ areas have similar urban morphology (building heights, building densities etc.). There are 10 urban categories of LCZ and each one can be linked to the degree that the urban area alters its climate (e.g. urban heat island intensity). The WUDAPT project has developed a simple procedure to link neighborhood scale areas to specific LCZ classes using a set of open source software tools and data (Google Earth, SAGA GIS, Geopedia and Landsat data). Local experts with knowledge of their city identify training areas, which are then used to classify Landsat images of the city into a LCZ map of the city. Each LCZ map is also a table of urban parameter values that can be used in urban climate models. The portal tools being developed allow these data to be extracted in a format suited to different modelling schemes.
Read the whole article HERE
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