Hello,
The DF Run Urban Weather Generator allows to morph a rural or airport EPW to reflect the conditions within an urban street canyon but how can I morph an airport EPW to reflect the conditions within a forest environment?
Thanks!
I donât know how to answer your question but I can confirm that you cannot do it with the Urban Weather Generator (UWG) or Dragonfly since these are only designed to model urban conditions. Maybe someone on the forum who has done Earth Surface Heat Balance research before might have a suggestion. I remember that the UWG is based loosely on this larger project called Town Energy Balance (TEB), which I vaguely remember has different modules for different land cover like forests or water bodies. This seems to be their Github:
But thatâs the limit of my knowledge here.
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@chris is correct and another point is that someone tried running UWG with zero built-up environment to was curious why it didnât revert back to the airport condition (Urban Heat Island in an "all-green" scenario). Some of the assumptions behind TEB means that it doesnât work very well for areas that do not have urban canyon geometries defined.
If you do have specific location in mind, do feel free to try EPW generated from ERA5 data (Weather Data Downloader) to compare - ERA5 Renalysis is derived from observational measurements and filtering it through numerical weather prediction model to do just what @chris mentioned, earth surface energy balance according to our understanding of atmospheric physics process.
Note that the ERA5 model takes into account surface vegetation type (some parameters are available such as low/high vegetation coverage) but this information doesnât get included in the EPW file thatâs generated and it doesnât take into account urban surface type - I think itâs actually assumed as flat low-vegetation for urban areas.
Disclaimer - I run the downloader app and you do need to sign up but you should be able to get up to 6 EPW files for free per month.
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