Local Climate Zones

Local Climate Zones (LCZ) is a particular land-use classification framework to describes urban surfaces structure and cover with consistency and comparability across cities, supporting applications in studies of urban heat waves, sustainable urbanization and urban energy balance 2. The LCZ classification scheme 3 and instructions are accessible through the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project web portal.

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Local Climate Zone scheme

Note

In the hands-on exercise, you will use an already available LCZ map of Milan. The analytical procedure to derive LCZ maps from optical satellite imagery is out of scope for this tutorial.

2

Stewart, I. D., & Oke, T. R. (2012). Local climate zones for urban temperature studies. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 93(12), 1879-1900.

3

Bechtel, B., Alexander, P. J., Böhner, J., Ching, J., Conrad, O., Feddema, J., … & Stewart, I. (2015). Mapping local climate zones for a worldwide database of the form and function of cities. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4(1), 199-219.