A New 3‐D Solar Radiation Model for 3‐D City Models

Abstract

Estimates of solar radiation distribution in urban areas are often limited by the complexity of urban environments. These limitations arise from spatial structures such as buildings and trees that affect spatial and temporal distributions of solar fluxes over urban surfaces. The traditional solar radiation models implemented in GIS can address this problem only partially. They can be adequately used only for 2‐D surfaces such as terrain and rooftops. However, vertical surfaces, such as facades, require a 3‐D approach. This study presents a new 3‐D solar radiation model for urban areas represented by 3‐D city models. The v.sun module implemented in GRASS GIS is based on the existing solar radiation methodology used in the topographic r.sun model with a new capability to process 3‐D vector data representing complex urban environments. The calculation procedure is based on the combined vector‐voxel approach segmenting the 3‐D vector objects to smaller polygon elements according to a voxel data structure of the volume region. The shadowing effects of surrounding objects are considered using a unique shadowing algorithm. The proposed model has been applied to the sample urban area with results showing strong spatial and temporal variations of solar radiation flows over complex urban surfaces.

Applications of 3D City Models: State of the Art Review

“…Recent work has focused on extending the task for vertical façades, and taking into account the material of the receiving surface [106,107] (Figure 3). This application may benefit from attributes such as the address and type of building for additional analyses [108], and it is being supported by an increasing number of software implementations [109,110]. Furthermore, some researchers use dense point clouds rather than semantic 3D city models (e.g., [111][112][113][114]).…”

When the display matters: A multifaceted perspective on 3D geovisualizations

“…With the growing use of 3D technologies in many areas such as, geology, geomorphology, hydrology, oceanography, meteorology, teaching geography, virtual tourism, documentation and preservation of cultural heritage, urban and transport planning, noise mapping, 3D cadastre [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and others, the usability of 3D visualizations is increasingly discussed. The importance of 3D visualization increases also in other fields such as crisis management and air traffic control (ATC), which represent geoscientific areas highly motivated to secure user-friendly ergonomics [13,14].…”

An improved LOD specification for 3D building models

“…LOD1 models provide a relatively high information content and usability comparing to their geometric detail (Henn et al, 2012;Hofierka and Zlocha, 2012). For instance, they may be used for shadowing simulations (Strzalka et al, 2012;Alam et al, 2013;Li et al, 2015), estimation of noise pollution (Stoter et al, 2008), energy demand estimation (Strzalka et al, 2011;Bahu et al, 2013), simulating floods (Varduhn et al, 2015), analysing wind comfort (Amorim et al, 2012), and visualisation (Gesquière and Manin, 2012).…”