Resolving Street Canyon Elements for Microscale Urban Climate Models with Ground-Based Lidar
Abstract
Numerical models used to study urban microclimates require high-resolution data of canyon structures and vegetation morphologies to resolve microscale urban form; however, current morphologic data acquisition methods are limited by technical constraints, time, and cost. This thesis assessed the accuracy of three linear LiDAR platforms (backpack, vehicle, and fused ground-and-aerial) against legacy measurements of building and street tree morphology. The results show that: (1) generally, the fused data product performed best, followed by the backpack; (2) the backpack and vehicle-based approaches were constrained in measuring building heights above 50 meters but excelled when measuring characteristics underneath street tree canopies, such as trunk height and diameter. Using (3) SLAM for the vehicle-MLS over GNSS and IMU-based positioning produced a low-cost platform, but did not achieve themodels, although the methods may be sufficient for microscale models with +4 m grid spacings.