Urban morphology at 60m resolution over Europe using Geoclimate and OpenStreetMap

Modeling the climate of urban areas requires a realistic urban model. But to be able to reproduce the climate of a specific city, the urban canopy model has to take into account its particularities such as the materials that make up the city, its geographical extend or the different morphologies of the urban canyon encountered in the city. Even a perfect urban canopy model needs a good representation of the city to be realistic.

OpenStreetMap is a complete, worldwide, open and collaborative database using multiple conventional and crowd-sourced data.

To take advantage of such database, Geoclimate tool has been used to retrieve the urban morphology over the whole Europe at the block scale. In addition to building, road and vegetations fractions, Geoclimate is able to retrieve the wall density and the building height in every city.

Different metrics were used to evaluate the richness of this European database. Then the data, originally in vector format has been rasterized at a 60m resolution and formatted to be used with Town Energy Balance (TEB) urban canopy model. The benefit of using such database in numerical weather prediction model such as MESONH over a well used state-of-the art land cover database such as ECOCLIMAP-SG is presented.