GLObal Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS) for city- and street- scale urban simulations: Development and first applications
This dataset enables finer-scale urban climate simulations for researchers and planners, addressing limitations in modeling urban hazards like heat, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with new data integration.
The researchers tackled the problem of lacking building-level data for urban simulations by developing UT-GLOBUS, a global dataset of building heights and urban canopy parameters, which improved air temperature representation by 55% in RMSE and achieved building height RMSEs of 9.1 meters and 7.8 meters in validations.
We introduce University of Texas - Global Building heights for Urban Studies (UT-GLOBUS), a dataset providing building heights and urban canopy parameters (UCPs) for more than 1200 cities or locales worldwide. UT-GLOBUS combines open-source spaceborne altimetry (ICESat-2 and GEDI) and coarse-resolution urban canopy elevation data with a machine-learning model to estimate building-level information. Validation using LiDAR data from six US cities showed UT-GLOBUS-derived building heights had a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 9.1 meters. Validation of mean building heights within 1-km^2 grid cells, including data from Hamburg and Sydney, resulted in an RMSE of 7.8 meters. Testing the UCPs in the urban Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-Urban) model resulted in a significant improvement (55% in RMSE) in intra-urban air temperature representation compared to the existing table-based local climate zone approach in Houston, TX. Additionally, we demonstrated the dataset's utility for simulating heat mitigation strategies and building energy consumption using WRF-Urban, with test cases in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. Street-scale mean radiant temperature simulations using the Solar and LongWave Environmental Irradiance Geometry (SOLWEIG) model, incorporating UT-GLOBUS and LiDAR-derived building heights, confirmed the dataset's effectiveness in modeling human thermal comfort in Baltimore, MD (daytime RMSE = 2.85 C). Thus, UT-GLOBUS can be used for modeling urban hazards with significant socioeconomic and biometeorological risks, enabling finer scale urban climate simulations and overcoming previous limitations due to the lack of building information.