[Geodata] Automated Urban Land Use and Land Cover Classification for Mesoscale Atmospheric Modeling over Canadian Cities

[Alexandre Leroux]

Hi Geodata list,

The forwarded email below may interest Canadians on the list. The 
approach described uses only open source software (including the obvious 
GDAL/OGR) and mostly uses publicly available geospatial data.


Have a nice day,

Alex

-- 
Alexandre Leroux, M.Sc., Ing.
Environnement Canada / Environment Canada
Centre météorologique canadien / Canadian Meteorological Centre
Section de la réponse aux urgences environnementales /
Environmental Emergency Response Section
alexandre.leroux at ec.gc.ca



On 11/20/08 15:58, Alexandre Leroux wrote:
>
> Dear GeoNET list,
>
> I wanted to inform you of an article recently accepted for publication 
> that could interest several of you. The article is named "Automated 
> Urban Land Use and Land Cover Classification for Mesoscale Atmospheric 
> Modeling over Canadian Cities" and will be on this ftp site for the 
> next two weeks:
> ftp://depot.cmc.ec.gc.ca/upload/eer/people/Alex/lerouxa_urban-lulc_geomatica_v081120.pdf 
>
>
> It is important to take into account that the approach described in 
> this article is our 'old approach' developed about three years ago. We 
> plan to update it by using CanVec (replacing the NTDB), SRTM-DEM 
> CSI-CGIAR v4, Census 2006 and newly available 3D urban buildings for 
> several Canadian cities. Our 'old results' are 44 urban classes at a 
> 5-m spatial resolution for all major Canadian cities. The resulting 
> classification is, in our opinion, quite interesting for urban areas 
> (can be automatically generated for anywhere in Canada, but does not 
> provide good results in non-urban areas). The process is fully 
> automated and very flexible (e.g. can easily be modified and augmented 
> to suit other needs than atmospheric modeling). The approach is simple 
> and mostly uses publicly available data at its core and only open 
> source software, so it is rather easy to duplicate the process.
>
> Here's the abstract:
>> An automated geospatial databases processing approach has been 
>> developed in order to characterize urban areas of major Canadian 
>> cities for their use in mesoscale atmospheric modeling. Mesoscale 
>> atmospheric numerical models, including urban canopy models such as 
>> the Town Energy Balance (TEB) model, require surface characteristics 
>> to represent surface processes occurring in cities. The developed 
>> methodology uses the following pan-Canadian databases: the National 
>> Topographic Data Base (NTDB) vector data for land use and land cover 
>> (LULC) characterization, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission 
>> (SRTM-DEM) and the Canadian Digital Elevation Data (CDED1) digital 
>> elevation models (DEM) for building height assessment, and census 
>> data for characteristics of residential districts. These databases 
>> are jointly processed to automatically generate a high-resolution 
>> urban LULC classification for Canadian cities.
>> The processing establishes the NTDB vector layer priority while 
>> making use of some of the feature attributes. To complete the 
>> information derived from the NTDB database, additional processing is 
>> done such as a population density measurement and an optional 
>> building height assessment. The final classes will be used, by means 
>> of an associative process, to specify the inputs for urban 
>> meteorological modeling. Results over Montreal and Vancouver are 
>> presented, with a discussion of their benefits and limitations. The 
>> approach compares favorably to previously available LULC 
>> classifications for mesoscale atmospheric modeling in Canada (e.g. 
>> Lemonsu et al., 2006 & 2008) and the main added benefits that this 
>> approach has are (a) Canada-wide applicability with available 
>> continuous databases, and (b) complete automation, with the exception 
>> of optional post-processing.
>
> Have a nice day,
>
> Alex
> -- 
> Alexandre Leroux, M.Sc., Ing.
> Environnement Canada / Environment Canada
> Centre météorologique canadien / Canadian Meteorological Centre
> Section de la réponse aux urgences environnementales /
> Environmental Emergency Response Section
> alexandre.leroux at ec.gc.ca
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geodata/attachments/20081120/61ea9985/attachment.html