A Street Graph-Based Morphometric Characterization of Two Large Urban Areas

Luca Salvadori, Maria Grazia Badas, Annalisa Di Bernardino, Giorgio Querzoli and Simone Ferrari
Additional contact information
Luca Salvadori: Department of Civil-Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy
Maria Grazia Badas: Department of Civil-Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy
Annalisa Di Bernardino: Physics Department, Sapienza University, 00185 Rome, Italy
Giorgio Querzoli: Department of Civil-Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy
Simone Ferrari: Department of Civil-Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: Urban microclimate modelling, both numerical and in the laboratory, has strong implications in many relevant health and life-style management issues e.g., in studies for assessment and forecast of air quality (for both outdoor and, as boundary conditions, indoor investigations), for thermometric trend analysis in urban zones, in cultural heritage preservation, etc. Moreover, the study of urban microclimate modelling is largely promoted and encouraged by international institutions for its implication in human health protection. In the present work, we propose and discuss an adaptive street graph-based method aimed at automatically computing the geometrical parameters adopted in atmospheric turbulent flow modelling. This method has been applied to two real cases, the Italian cities of Rome and Cagliari, and its results has been compared with the ones from traditional methods based on regular grids. Results show that the proposed method leads to a more accurate determination of the urban canyon parameters (Canyon Aspect Ratio and Building Aspect Ratio) and morphometric parameters (Planar Area Index and Frontal Area Index) compared to traditional regular grid-based methods, at least for the tested cases. Further investigations on a larger number of different urban contexts are planned to thoroughly test and validate the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: urban climate; street canyon; street-based morphometry; air quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1025/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1025/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:3:p:1025-:d:483614

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().