Urban Morphology Extractor: A spatial tool for characterizing urban morphology

Urban climate studies crucially depend on various urban morphological parameters. The availability of these parameters assists in understanding wind flow inside urban areas, Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon and also aids in estimation of anthropogenic heat in Numerical Weather Prediction models for improved forecast. Of the two approaches used, micrometeorological approach is un-suitable for urban applications due to various operational complexities. Morphometric approaches are more feasible to use in urban areas but their estimation requires automation. The paper presents a software suite which uses novel and existing algorithms to compute variety of urban morphometric parameters including frontal area, height-to-width ratio and sky view factor, which further can be used for the computation of aerodynamic parameters. The application is developed using open source technologies and each component is tested over a sample dataset. The estimated values were validated against manually calculated values and error percentage was found to be within 3% and then demonstrated on a real city database. The developed application can be effectively utilized for urban climate modeling studies, as it enables users to compute urban morphology parameters.