Effect of urban development on local albedo

A study based on LiDAR data

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

S.A. Marathe Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

H. Ziar Photovoltaic Materials and Devices - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Y. Zhou Photovoltaic Materials and Devices - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Shreedatta Marathe
Urban Development LiDAR data Local albedo Albedo map
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Published Date

31-08-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Changes in social, cultural, and economic paradigms have resulted in a collective shift from rural to urban areas over the last few decades. Cities are expanding to accommodate the ever-increasing population influx in urban areas. New buildings, roads, airports, and harbors are only a small part of urban development. It also includes the use of new agricultural lands and changes to water resources surrounding urban areas. These new developments invariably introduce complex geometry onto surfaces as well as a plethora of new materials into a field, which leads to the change in local albedo. Albedo indicates how well a surface reflects solar energy, and it is defined as the ratio of total reflected irradiation from a surface to total incident irradiation on the surface. Albedo has a wide range of applications such as estimating the total heat content of an area and assessing the global warming potential. In this project, we used our Geometric Spectral Albedo model developed in the PVMD research group and open source LiDAR data (AHN1 to AHN4 collected over roughly 25 years) to investigate how urban development affects the local albedo.