Morphological Database of Paris for Atmospheric Modeling Purposes

This paper presents a morphological database, aimed to be applied as boundary data for atmospheric modeling. The database has been created from freely available sources and 13 ASAR images that were provided by European Space Agency (ESA) through Announcement of Opportunity (AO). Urban themes were extracted from optical data and digital maps by supervised spectral minimum distance to means classification. Urban topography was modeled using multibaseline Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) with phase unwrapping based on Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation. In combining obtained InSAR height data with urban classification from optical images, additional features that are beyond the SAR resolution were added to the urban topography layer. The methods of retrieval of morphological data are discussed as well as the generation of the height model. The results are compared to the existing Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation model and the BDTopo Parisian database. We also address an example application of the database, a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of urban canopy flow over the Paris area.