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Neighborhood Adaptive Tissues for Urban Resilience Futures
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NATURF: Neighborhood Adaptive Tissues for Urban Resilience Futures

Origin: NATURF was developed for IM3 by extending the capability of the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT) (Ching et al., 2009, sponsored by US EPA) to the generation of sub-kilometer resolution urban terrain. Further development for IM3 includes the representation of both existing and projected (PMA and Urban-LMC) urban terrain for selected cities
NATURF addresses the knowledge gap of the effect of the geometry of a neighborhood on the local meteorology. The first products to be developed for IM3 Phase 2 by NATURF will be conversions of shapefiles of existing Census tract morphologies for the three to six selected cities to urban terrain at 100m resolution readable by WRF using the current version of NATURF. NATURF will also generate WRF-readable neighborhood morphological predictions. Starting with the shapefiles that generated the previous products, NATURF will generate additions to neighborhoods based on SSP3 and SSP5 population location predictions from the Country-Level Urban Buildup Scenario-Spatially Explicit Long-term Empirical City Development CLUBS-SELECT model (Gao and O’Neill, 2020), land use/land cover predictions and district designations (industrial, commercial, residential) from the Demeter model (Vernon et al., 2018), neighborhood socio-economic characteristics from PMA, and building use types based on AutoBEM model archetypes. Boundary conditions of building height and spacing parameters will be generated by Baylor University based on models linking urban-scale building morphologies to urban expansion projections from CLUBS-SELECT and Demeter. These parameters will provide a range of expected conditions of building topographies for a given set of urban landcover expansion trajectories. These high-resolution datasets will also be informed by and mapped to the morphological inputs used by the Community Land Model Urban (CLMU) continental US (CONUS) scale modeling performed by Boston University.

Translating neighborhood morphology (building footprints, heights, spacing, etc.) representations to WRF-readable urban parameters so that meteorological processes at urban scale can interact with the built environment.
Credit: ORNL team

IM3 Papers