Local climate zones in five southern European cities: An improved GIS-based classification method based on Copernicus data

Oliveira, Ana; Lopes, António; Niza, Samuel

doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2020.100631

Cited by 51 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…To ensure data quality, the devices were subject to testing routines every 2 to 3 years, and no meaningful measurement differences were detected [5][6][7]. Figure 1 and Table 1 show the list of sites, as well as their main geographical and land cover characteristics, such as: (i) distances to the riverside and Atlantic coast, as per the Euclidian distance algorithm implemented in ArcGISv13.1; (ii) local climate zone classes (LCZ) [37,38]; and (iii) altitude and topographic exposure indices of the four main quadrants (north, south, east and west), obtained from the Global Digital Elevation Model Version 3 (DEM) of the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) [39][40][41].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heatwaves and Summer Urban Heat Islands: A Daily Cycle Approach to Unveil the Urban Thermal Signal Changes in Lisbon, Portugal

et al. 2021

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Lisbon is a European Mediterranean city, greatly exposed to heatwaves (HW), according to recent trends and climate change prospects. Considering the Atlantic influence, air temperature observations from Lisbon’s mesoscale network are used to investigate the interactions between background weather and the urban thermal signal (UTS) in summer. Days are classified according to the prevailing regional wind direction, and hourly UTS is compared between HW and non-HW conditions. Northern-wind days predominate, revealing greater maximum air temperatures (up to 40 ˚C) and greater thermal amplitudes (approximately 10 ˚C), and account for 37 out of 49 HW days; southern-wind days have milder temperatures, and no HWs occur. Results show that the wind direction groups are significantly different. While southern-wind days have minor UTS variations, northern-wind days have a consistent UTS daily cycle: a diurnal urban cooling island (UCI) (often lower than –1.0 ˚C), a late afternoon peak urban heat island (UHI) (occasionally surpassing 4.0 ˚C), and a stable nocturnal UHI (1.5 ˚C median intensity). UHI/UCI intensities are not significantly different between HW and non-HW conditions, although the synoptic influence is noted. Results indicate that, in Lisbon, the UHI intensity does not increase during HW events, although it is significantly affected by wind. As such, local climate change adaptation strategies must be based on scenarios that account for the synergies between potential changes in regional air temperature and wind.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heatwaves and Summer Urban Heat Islands: A Daily Cycle Approach to Unveil the Urban Thermal Signal Changes in Lisbon, Portugal

et al. 2021

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“…Yet to date, the feasibility of such procedures for large-scale LCZ mapping has not yet been demonstrated (Demuzere et al, 2020a). Many others have developed GIS-based approaches using datasets from e.g., city administrations or derived from crowd-sourced cartographic services such as OpenStreetMap (Lelovics et al, 2014;Quan et al, 2017;Samsonov and Trigub, 2017;Wang et al, 2018;Hidalgo et al, 2019;Quan, 2019;Oliveira et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020). The latter study also proposes an extension to the default WUDAPT accuracy assessment, by integrating GIS data (e.g., building footprints and heights, and pervious surface fraction).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps

Demuzere

Kittner

Bechtel

2021

Front. Environ. Sci.

136

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Since their introduction in 2012, Local Climate Zones (LCZs) emerged as a new standard for characterizing urban landscapes, providing a holistic classification approach that takes into account micro-scale land-cover and associated physical properties. In 2015, as part of the community-based World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project, a protocol was developed that enables the mapping of cities into LCZs, using freely available data and software packages, yet performed on local computing facilities. The LCZ Generator described here further simplifies this process, providing an online platform that maps a city of interest into LCZs, solely expecting a valid training area file and some metadata as input. The web application (available at https://lcz-generator.rub.de) integrates the state-of-the-art of LCZ mapping, and simultaneously provides an automated accuracy assessment, training data derivatives, and a novel approach to identify suspicious training areas. As this contribution explains all front- and back-end procedures, databases, and underlying datasets in detail, it serves as the primary “User Guide” for this web application. We anticipate this development will significantly ease the workflow of researchers and practitioners interested in using the LCZ framework for a variety of urban-induced human and environmental impacts. In addition, this development will ease the accessibility and dissemination of maps and their metadata.

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“…The Local Climate Zones (LCZ) from Copernicus Toolbox (LCZC) method entails a sequence of steps to reclassify several Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) layers into a LCZ-based [1 , 2] classification, that can be used in urban climate-related studies, in 800 European urban regions. The method aims to provide an alternative solution to the satellite-based World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) supervised classification process [3] , ensuring the greater accuracy and higher spatial resolution of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based methods [4] , [5] , [6] while preserving the ability to be freely reproducible. To process the LCZC tool, ArcGIS software with Advanced License is necessary.…”

Section: Methods Detailsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The presented method was tested in 5 Southern European cities [5] : Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Marseille and Naples [4] . Even though Stewart and Oke describe 300 m as a reasonable minimum radius for the LCZ classification [2 , 17] , the resulting LCZ shapefile datasets were converted to a 50 m pixel raster format, where each pixel value depicts the LCZ class that has the greatest area.…”

Section: Methods Detailsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local climate zones classification method from Copernicus land monitoring service datasets: An ArcGIS-based toolbox

2020

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Local Climate Zones (LCZ) have become a worldwide standard for identifying land cover classes, according to their climate-relevant morphological parameters. The LCZ's are mostly used to evaluate urban climate performance, particularly the relationship between the urban heat island effect (UHI) and the characteristics of the built-up environment. The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) has provided a supervised LCZ classification method based only on moderate resolution free satellite imagery, mostly Landsat 7 or 8 (30 m pixel size, in the visible spectrum brands); however, its’ results are less accurate for European cities. Conversely, alternative geographic information system (GIS)-based methods developed so far require information that is hardly available to all, such as building footprints or heights. Here, the ArcGIS based LCZ from Copernicus Toolbox (LCZC) provides an alternative classification method that uses only freely accessible information from the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), being possible to replicate it in 800 European urban locations. The method combines Urban Atlas (UA) and Corine Land Cover (CLC) with Tree Cover Density, Dominant Leaf Type and Grassland information, to produce a higher-resolution baseline shapefile that is classified according to each feature's dominant characteristics. The LCZC toolbox output is a LCZ raster map. It has been validated in five European cities: Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Marseille, and Naples. The LCZC toolbox provides an alternative LCZ GIS-based classification, based on freely accessible CLMS datasets. The use of CLMS shapefile higher-resolution inputs, particularly the UA and CLC datasets, ensures an output LCZ map that has greater detail and higher accuracy. The availability of CLMS information in 800 European urban areas guarantees that the method can be replicated in those locations.

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Local climate zones in five southern European cities: An improved GIS-based classification method based on Copernicus data

Cited by 51 publications

References 35 publications

Heatwaves and Summer Urban Heat Islands: A Daily Cycle Approach to Unveil the Urban Thermal Signal Changes in Lisbon, Portugal

Heatwaves and Summer Urban Heat Islands: A Daily Cycle Approach to Unveil the Urban Thermal Signal Changes in Lisbon, Portugal

LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps

Local climate zones classification method from Copernicus land monitoring service datasets: An ArcGIS-based toolbox

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