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naturf: a package for generating urban parameters for numerical weather modeling

by Levi Sweet-breu, Emily Rexer, Chris Vernon, Melissa R Dumas, Stefan Krawczyk
Publication Type
Journal
Journal Name
The Journal of Open Source Software
Publication Date
Page Number
6712
Volume
9
Issue
98

The Neighborhood Adaptive Tissues for Urban Resilience Futures tool (NATURF) is a Python workflow that generates files readable by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. NATURF uses geopandas (Jordahl et al., 2020) and hamilton (Krawczyk & Izzy, 2022) to calculate 132 building parameters from shapefiles with building footprint and height information. These parameters can be collected and used in many formats, and the primary output is a binary file configured for input to WRF. This workflow is a flexible adaptation of the National/World Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT/WUDAPT) (Ching et al., 2009; Mills et al., 2015) that can be used with any study area at any spatial resolution. The climate modeling community and urban planners can identify the effects of building/neighborhood morphology on the microclimate using the urban parameters and WRF-readable files produced by NATURF. More information on the urban parameters calculated can be found in the documentation.