I recently stumbled upon the Vertical City Weather Generator, and was pleasantly surprised to see @chris & @SaeranVasanthakumar as co-authors. I find the VCWG model better than the original UWG in many regards and was wondering if there is any intention of incorporating as part of LBT ?
Any additional tips/pitfalls to watch out for when trying the VCWG?
Wish you a great day ahead!
ps. If anyone is interested to know more about it, here is the paper:
Edit 2: Apparently there is now even version 2.0.0 available, which includes hydrology. The paper is here:
Hi,
I´ve also downloaded this paper but where can i find the program?
I´m working on a DF model with UWG and UHI sensitivity seems very low.
Thanks in advance.
The model (version 1.3.2) can be downloaded from here:
Although be advised that I haven’t actually used the VCWG yet (sorry if I gave you that impression). I just read the paper and found it to be quite promising, hence posted here in the hope to get some more information
I find the VCWG model better than the original UWG in many regards and was wondering if there is any intention of incorporating as part of LBT ?
Yeap, that was the original idea. Mohsen (the VCWG author) was open to integrating his model with Ladybug, when he started his project, although I don’t know what his current stance is.
I agree integration with LBT would be great. Version one made multiple improvements to the original UWG, not just adding the vertical diffusion model, but also modeling the interaction between solar radiation and vegetation in detail. I haven’t read the paper for his second version, so can’t comment on that yet.
As an aside: it’d be great to just see the VCWG source code on github. VCWG is extended from Ladybug’s underlying Python model for UWG, (which in turn we translated from @josephyang’s matlab version of UWG), so it would be useful to see how he added his improvements. His paper includes a note stating source is available on request, but, as far as I can tell, it isn’t shared anywhere. I wonder if he’d be opposed to hosting it on github?
Thanks for bringing this up, @MohammadHamza , as I hadn’t checked in on this in a while. Following the links you posted, it seems that Moshen actually published the VCWG model in GitHub here 3 years ago:
So it looks like Moshen made all of the VCWG code public and just forgot to tell us, @SaeranVasanthakumar . Or maybe he did and the email went to my spam folder. Looking at the code, it seems pretty clear that he started from an older version of your Python UWG, @SaeranVasanthakumar , back before you added the CLI and the JSON schema for the UWG input.
So it should be possible to reconcile the two repos and update your Python implementation of the UWG with Moshen’s improvements. Needless to say, if you or anyone else wanted to take this on and send a pull request for this, I would be glad to review and merge it.
I’ll also add that, if the new dependencies on numpy and scipy end up being blockers, I’d be ok with adding them into the dependencies of the UWG and making the UWG run exclusively on Python 3. Right now, we always run the UWG from CLI anyway, meaning that we really only need Python 3 support. And, unlike 3 years ago, Python 2 is officially deprecated now.
If the update ends up happening, I think we can also use it as an excuse to get on the same page about the license of the UWG. Bruno and @josephyang never published an official license for the UWG, though they told us that they wanted it to be broadly used with essentially no strings attached. I know we posted a GPL license for your Python version but that was only because all of the other LBT core libraries at the time were using it. It seems like an MIT license is probably closer to the original intention and I’d be happy to change the UWG officially over to that.
It is good to connect with you. I found this conversation recently and thought to inform you with the most recent developments for the Vertical City Weather Generator (VCWG). Mohsen did great work developing the initial versions of VCWG, but then he moved on to the world of environmental consulting. He may collaborate with future developments of VCWG in future. At the moment, new VCWG developments and releases are handled by the Atmospheric Innovations Research (AIR) lab at the University of Guelph. Most versions of VCWG are publicly available on the AIR lab’s GitHub site: AmirAAliabadi (Atmospheric Innovations Research (AIR) Lab) · GitHub
Below are details of versions with key software features:
VCWG v1.3.2: Initial Version
VCWG v1.4.5: Renewable and Alternative Energy
VCWG v1.5.0: Micro-Genetic Optimization
VCWG v2.0.0: Top-Forcing and Hydrology
