Review of Methods for Estimating Urban Surface Roughness

Abstract

Growing urban population is rapidly changing the roughness of today’s cities and greatly influencing the urban climate. Two methods of roughness estimation, micrometeorological and morphometric methods are used by researchers. Micrometeorological methods require extensive setup of filed instruments which is costly and quite unfeasible in urban areas. However, morphometric based method uses geometry of urban roughness elements, which can be easily determined with the use of high resolution remote sensing data sets. The computation of roughness parameters is easier than before due to increasing computation capabilities in GIS domain. Hence, morphometric methods holds a promising future for understanding urban climate.