Visualization-Based Decision Tool for Urban Meteorological Modeling

We present a visualization-based decision tool that enables exploring the link between urban land use and urban weather, in particular predicting and visualizing changes in urban temperature, precipitation, and humidity. Our work combines recent work from urban planning, weather and climate studies, and visualization and computer graphics. Our approach uses an interactive tool to produce quickly and automatically plausible detailed 3D city models by means of a hybrid computational simulation of urban behavior and procedural urban geometry. From the city model, urban morphology parameters are efficiently computed and used by our custom meteorological simulator which considers the influence of the urban landscape. The result is a compelling visualization ability for understanding the complex feedback between urban land use and the regional meteorology of current cities and of potential future cities with desired greening patterns. Our work includes a case-study example spanning a 1600 km2 area.