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IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
LiDAR-Based Approach for Urban Ventilation
Corridors Mapping
Marzena Wicht and Andreas Wicht
Abstract—Cities, recognized as one of the roughest surfaces,
significantly reduce wind velocity. This leads to a greater concen-
tration of pollution and increased temperature in urban areas. A
proper urban design may promote the air flow and mitigate these
negative phenomena. This paper describes a novel approach to
detect and analyze the potential urban ventilation corridors. The
concept is based on the morphometric analyses, where roughness
parameters (such as roughness length and displacement height),
as well as porosity are investigated as opposed to previous studies.
Commonly available light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data en-
able more detailed terrain study, as the topography and obstacle
features (type, dimensions, and porosity) might be investigated. In
comparison to the previous studies and long adapted practices, this
approach takes advantage of all information incorporated in Li-
DAR data to deliver even more accurate results. The comparison of
the detected corridors, with the officially designed corridors in our
study area in Warsaw, suggests inaccuracies in their extent (only
40% of their areas might still be functioning) and calls for an eval-
uation. The results deliver areas that may be recognized as urban
ventilation corridors and serve as air regeneration and ventilation
system. They may also be used for developing new solutions for
continuously evolving cities.
Index Terms—Drag coefficient for vegetation, light detection and
ranging (LiDAR), morphometric methods, roughness parameters,
urban ventilation corridors.
I. INTRODUCTION
INCE 2014 more than half of human population lives in
S urbanized areas [1]. The urbanization index varies greatly
over the world, from 38% of sub-Saharan area to more than
80% in North America. The pace of this process also varies in
different geographical regions. Southeast Asian urban regions
and their megacities, such as Tokyo, Delhi, or Shanghai, are one
of the fastest urbanizing areas in the world and, therefore, have
caught more scientific attention. Recently, the research focus
has switched toward African agglomerations—as the next big
urban boom—yet the overall urban growth occurs elsewhere
as well. Europe, with stagnant or even declining population, is
getting older and at the same time more densely built-up. The
Manuscript received September 28, 2017; revised November 14, 2017 and
December 25, 2017; accepted December 27, 2017. (Corresponding author:
Marzena Wicht.)
M. Wicht is with the Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing
and GIS, Warsaw University of Technology Warsaw, Warsaw 00-661, Poland
(e-mail: mwicht@gik.pw.edu.pl).
A. Wicht is with Geodata Science Team, GfK Geomarketing GmbH, Bruchsal
76646, Germany (e-mail: andreas@wichts.net).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTARS.2018.2791410
1939-1404 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
urbanization index nears 74% in Europe and is fairly stable [2].
Whereas aforementioned megacities attract a lot of debates, lots
of other urbanized areas lack the publicity, and therefore, funds
required to adopt settlements for climate change.
On the one hand, more and more people live in cities and
this share might swell, according to United Nations [1], to 66%
in 2050. On the other hand, Shepherd reports [3] that cities
occupy only 2% of land surface. As a result, we have approx-
imately 3.3 billion people [4] living in a relatively small area,
which at the same time contribute approximately 80% of the
global greenhouse gas emissions [5]. Such density generates
numerous problems for our everyday living. The worsening the
sanitary conditions and elevated urban air temperature, relative
to rural areas, had already been noticed at the beginning of 19th
century by Howard [6] toward the end of the industrial revo-
lution, which brought many factories and following workers to
the cities. Since then many researchers have tried to find a solu-
tion to mitigate the negative effects of the dense, urban living.
The idea of garden cities [7], green belts [8], or restoring nat-
ural river path [9] have been developed over time, yet the need
to find better methods increases. More and more cities suffer
from the urban heat island (UHI) both in tropical and temper-
ate zones [10]–[12] and the disturbed urban heat budget. These
problems exist due to the energy and water budget variations in
the built environment [13], as the urban fabrics, land cover, and
metabolism are the most contributing factors. On average, an
urban citizen is faced up with higher air pollution and temper-
ature as well as decreased access to the wind speed and green
areas relative to rural inhabitant. The latter have been proved to
improve city’s climate and structure, as they are often a source
of fresh and clean air and provide relaxation areas. On a city
scale, if designed properly, they can also facilitate air flow and
penetrate the inner city with the fresh and cool air and discharge
warm and polluted air to the outskirts. Since cities are one of
the roughest aerodynamic boundaries, modeling and designing
such ventilation corridors pose many challenges and requires
thorough investigation.
Surface roughness influences the wind velocity—the higher
the roughness, the slower the wind. To describe and model this
component in urban context, several parameters are known in
the literature. Roughness parameters illustrate how efficiently
wind travels above specified canopy layer [14], [15]. By calcu-
lating and analyzing many urban aerodynamic indices, we can
detect areas, which—due to their roughness characteristics and
spatial allocation—promote air flow. Yet, their determination
poses many challenges, as there is no straightforward method to
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2 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
derive them. Altogether, we can divide urban scale aerodynamic
assessment methods into three categories [15], [16]:
1) reference (classification) based methods;
2) micrometeorological (anemometric) methods;
3) morphometric methods.
The reference method relates to the roughness estimation
based on the earlier measurements. Davenport [14] and Wieringa
[17] created reference tables for different land-use classes—but
for homogenous surfaces, whereas Grimmond and Oke [18]
focused on urban canopy. Unfortunately, the method requires
visual photography assessment, which may lead to subjective
results and diligence errors. In addition, they are severely limited
with wind direction inclusion.
Multiple micrometeorological methods exist in the literature
(detailed overview in [16]) and they use sensors located at dif-
ferent heights across the city, where the logarithmic wind profile
is valid
u ∗ z − zd
ūz = ln
κ z0
where ūz is the mean horizontal wind speed at height z, u∗ is the
friction velocity, z0 is the aerodynamical roughness length, zd is
the zero-displacement height, and κ = 0.40 is the von Karman
constant [19]. Naturally, the logarithmic wind law applies during
neutral weather conditions and might be used approximately up
to 200 m. Yet, this method requires high amount of observations
[20] and is sensitive to errors. Moreover, the campaigns are very
time- and cost-intensive, and due to private property or local
laws, they might not be allowed in all desired locations.
Numerous morphometric methods have been developed over
the years and each one has its own assumptions, preferred
application, and limitations. Adolphe [21] developed a set of
indicators (density, rugosity, porosity, sinuosity, occlusivity,
compacity, contiguity, solar admittance, and mineralization),
which he then used to derive urban climate characteristics. In
comparison to prevailing urban climate studies, he does not
base his calculations on (1), therefore, he does not derive dis-
placement height and roughness length, but refers to rugosity
(absolute and relative). Although his assumptions take into con-
sideration the mean obstacle height and width depending on
the wind direction, the approach was tested just on a small
neighborhood [21], [22] and not on city scale, and the results
were not validated, which makes it harder to compare with
other morphometric studies. Most of them investigate various
implications of displacement height and roughness length (al-
together called as roughness parameters) on the urban climate
and they all derive those from logarithmic wind profile. Com-
monly known and referred to are methods developed by Rau-
pach [23], Bottema [24], Macdonald [25], Grimmond and Oke
[18], Millward-Hopkins [26], and Kanda [27]. According to
Kent [16], they can be split into two types based on the fact
how do they treat obstacle height—as a mean for a given ref-
erence idea, or as variable/maximum height. Kanda [27] and
Millward-Hopkins [26] use this approach, as they argue Hm ax
is more suitable scaling parameter to map roughness element
heterogeneity. Another possible method of division is the ref-
erence area. Many studies utilize various type of mesh (regular
or adaptive) [20], [26], [28], whereas the “voronoi” approach
also wins recognition [15], [29]–[31]. The method developed by
Millward-Hopkins has also been implemented in wind resource
calculation [32]–[34], where he also integrates light detection
and ranging (LiDAR) and digital elevation model (DEM) data in
order to increase accuracy and eliminate gross errors. Although
the method studies in detail wind velocity above the canopy
layer, it is possible, that it might also be used in urban ven-
tilation corridor mapping. While studying wind speeds and/or
directions on a microscale, wind tunnel simulations and com-
putational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are used. Although
CFD studies consider wind velocities (which influences heat
transferred inside street canyons and courtyards) [35] and they
describe single buildings in detail, they are exclusively imple-
mented on very small areas due to high computational costs.
Various CFD models are used in engineering flow analysis,
building and structural design, pollution dispersion, and wind
flow modeling [15]. They include physical models that try to
represent the real urban setting, and therefore, model the wind
(1) flow along the streets and buildings. Even when they are em-
ployed to map wind resources (with aid of LiDAR data), they
deliver more accurate results (in comparison to the analytical
approach), however, at the expense of computational time [36].
Running these simulations requires power of supercomputers
and remains still a challenge [37], [38].
In our previous studies, we adopted the approach proposed
in [15], [24], and [29], where we calculated the aerodynam-
ical roughness length (z0 ) and zero-displacement height (zd )
and conditioned their values (as suggested by [18] and [39])
to retrieve areas of potential ventilation corridors. However, we
noticed two essential features, which were being omitted: the
terrain topography and the vegetation. These concepts assumed
that the terrain is flat, and the vegetation does not obstruct air
flow. For this reason, we decided to include these two features,
by using building and vegetation database obtained from LiDAR
data. We calculated the aforementioned parameters for both to-
pographies (flat terrain and digital surface model—DSM) and
added an extra parameter—porosity, which has helped us to
vary between bluff and porous bodies in order to model how
they block the wind.
The main objective of the study was to compare the two ap-
proaches. One utilized in many studies, yet neglecting some fea-
tures; second—a novel developed concept including topography
and vegetation in possible urban ventilation corridor mapping.
The second approach also requires consideration on the condi-
tioning values, since they were developed for the theoretically
flat terrain, which we also tested and discussed.
II. STUDY AREA
Similarly to our previous studies [30], [40], we located our in-
vestigation area in Warsaw for two reasons: it has historically de-
signed ventilation corridors, so not only can we compare two ap-
proaches, we can also contrast their results with the actual design
and use it for the evaluation. Second of all, Warsaw represents
an average European metropolis—it lies in the temperate zone,
which is one of the biggest cities in Europe, has a population of
1.8 million inhabitants and almost twice as many city workers.
It occupies more than 500 km2 and has a population density of
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WICHT AND WICHT: LIDAR-BASED APPROACH FOR URBAN VENTILATION CORRIDORS MAPPING 3

3391 people/km² [41]. Also, the biggest river in Poland (Vistula

River) flows through the city for 28 km. in addition, Warsaw has
quite an interesting topography with clearly visible post-glacier
riverbed, which extends between 5 and 10 km within Warsaw
administrative boundaries. This riverbed makes the most iconic
topographic feature–Warsaw escarpment—present in everyday
lives of each inhabitant. It runs along the riverbed and the height
differences vary from 10 to 22 m and its inclination reaches 30°.
Such higher ground just above the vast river decided the city’s
location centuries ago and influenced greatly Warsaw’s spatial
development.
Although the annually average precipitation and air temper-
ature is considered typical for the temperate zone in Europe,
Warsaw also faces challenges due to the climate change. Sum-
mer flash flood events occur regularly and endanger the lives
of the inhabitants, the air pollution gradually worsens—lately,
the increase in smog caught a lot of attention, and the elevated
air temperature lowers the thermal comfort of living. Warsaw,
among many other cities, suffers from UHI that can get as high
as 9 °C [42]. An increasing number of these violent weather
events, as well as their randomness, urges local government to
develop and implement new strategies that might help adapting
to the climate change.
A. Warsaw Ventilation Corridors
Fig. 1. Designed ventilation corridors in Warsaw in 1992 and 2006.
These needs were noticed much earlier in Warsaw—at the
beginning of the 20th century—when population was getting
close to one million and the sanitary conditions were decreas- 6) Jerozolimski—has the best wind conditions and runs par-
ing. City planners were developing various ideas to increase tially through one of the biggest transportation valley—
standard of living. They proposed a radiocentric-linear growth Jerozolimskie Alley, not many supply areas.
model of Warsaw, which was supposed to slow down the urban 7) Western Railway—aids Jerozolimski corridor in air ex-
sprawl and provide enough relaxation areas. Several green belts change, occupies western railway infrastructure.
were supposed to prevent city-spreading and a system of urban 8) Bemowski—being connected to the Kampinowski
ventilation corridors (consisting of urban green areas) was to primeval forest and big share of vegetation and recreation
ventilate and regenerate the air in the city. The idea changed and areas supplies city with clean and cool air.
was updated through the turbulent socialist period in Poland and In 2006, the newer, updated Study of the Conditions and
was finally officially ratified in 1992. It determined nine ven- Directions of the Spatial Management of Warsaw (pol. SUiKZP,
tilation corridors, which were legally binding till 2006. These hereafter the Study) changed their extent. Even while preparing
were as follows. the Study, in 2001, the officials commissioned a comprehensive
1) Vistula river with adjacent Wilanowski corridor—28 km research evaluating the performance of the air ventilation system
long, mostly unoccupied water body with adjacent coastal (ventilation corridors), which clearly states how important it
regions (vegetation, meadows, etc.) and partially nonin- was to preserve and protect the corridors’ areas. Yet, the study
tensive housing mostly discharges the polluted and warm decided to diminish the Bródnowski corridor’s role by removing
air from the center. it from the official air ventilation and regeneration system and
2) Bródnowski—has rather small effect in the city-scale ven- substituting it with the Northern Railway corridor. Although it
tilation, due to the prevailing wind-directions (mostly is well supplied by the fresh and cool air coming from Jabłonna
western), but has a huge meaning locally, as it has one forests, it lacks continuity and goes through vast industrial areas
of the best supply areas (vast forests). (including CHP Żerań coal power plant). We can see the changes
3) Eastern Railway—runs partially through the eastern rail- of the air ventilation and regeneration system from 1992 to 2006
way infrastructure. in Fig. 1, and Table I presents the areawise modification of each
4) Podskarpowy—runs along Warsaw’s escarpment, its corridor in those two periods.
biggest role is discharging heated and polluted air from While the extent of the system was designed over 100 years
the city center. ago, urban planners did not have the access to the modern tech-
5) Mokotowski—starts with huge green or sparsely occupied nology and modeling possibilities. Even the evaluation analysis
areas of Warsaw’s Chopin Airport to reach one of the from 2001 was based on the land cover classification and evalu-
biggest green areas in Warsaw, over the years gradually ation as in [14]. That is why, we believe that this issue should be
built up. investigated using morphometric methods, as we have a unique
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4 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
TABLE I
VENTILATION CORRIDORS AREAS (SQUARE KILOMETER) IN 1992 AND 2006
ID Name 1992 2006
1+4 Vistula + Wilanowski 39.58 66.21
2 Bródnowski 16.05 0 −100%
3 East Railway 4.32 5.43
5 Podskarpowy 6.79 10.85
6 Mokotowski 8.66 11.33
7 Jerozolimski 3.69 4.14
8 West Railway 6.01 3.65
9 Bemowski 9.07 7.19
10 North Railway 0.00 7.16
Sum 105.34 115.96
possibility to assess the original design and see if there are
any other areas (previously omitted) that could aid the air flow.
Particularly, since Warsaw’s air quality has been declining.
III. DATA AND METHODS
A. Data
The main objective of the study was to compare the commonly
used approach—in deriving potential urban corridors—with our
new concept, where we include the vegetation and topography,
as two essential variables in the wind flow calculation. In our
previous approaches [30], [40], we utilized SPOT imagery to
retrieve the building outlines and cadastral geodatabase for the
quality check and the height attribute. These two parameters—
obstacles dimension and spatial alignment—are crucial in calcu-
lating roughness indices. Other studies have used various input
data: Gál and Unger [15] used a three-dimensional (3-D) build-
ing database available for Szeged. Bechtel [43] used SAR data
and worked on a normalized DSM taking all possible obstacles
into account, yet he did not derive zo and zd parameters but
rather focused on topology, statistics, and texture of all rough-
ness elements for a specific wind direction. Suder and Szy-
manowski [29] obtained building database from LiDAR aided
with CityGML data, and Ketterer et al. [31] benchmarked three
models based on 2.5-D cadastral database (one of which in-
cluded vegetation). Including topography and vegetation in the
roughness calculation is, therefore, not a standard yet. In order
to obtain this information, we need more precise data.
For this reason, we acquired LiDAR data from the Cen-
tral Documentation Center of Geodesy and Cartography (pol.
CODGiK). Unfortunately, the latest available datasets were
from 2012, as the 2015 campaign is still in progress. The av-
erage pulse density for big agglomerations such as Warsaw is
12 p/m2 . The data supplied by the CODGiK were preclassi-
fied (not classified; ground; low vegetation (0–0.4 m); medium
vegetation (0.4–2 m); high vegetation; buildings; noise; water
bodies) and for whole Warsaw resulted in more than 500 GB
of data. With such an amount of point-cloud data, the prepro-
cessing software had to be chosen carefully. For this reason,
we compressed the ∗.LAS to ∗.LAZ files, extracted building
and vegetation layers and calculated the DEM and DSM of
Warsaw with LAStools [44]. We also noticed the need to im-
prove our terrain/surface model derivation, as it was a common
practice to use only first returns to construct the interpolating
surface for DTM/DSM generation. Usually, the first return is
the highest for an airborne survey, where the scanner is located
Difference above the terrain. Using this first return means that some of
67% the detail is missing and not all data are used. This becomes
the problem with off-nadir scans (e.g., from unmanned aerial
26% vehicle—UAV). Moreover, when there are clouds or high noise,
60%
31% first returns are often discarded, and the remaining returns are
12% not renumbered, which leads to further mistakes. For this reason,
−39% we implemented the algorithm proposed by Khosravipour [45],
−21%
100% which triangulates all relevant LiDAR returns using constrained
Delaunay algorithm to derive a DSM.
In order to take the topography into account, we have ob-
tained the height attribute for each obstacle from the DSM.
However, while calculating it, we noticed a flaw in this simpli-
fied approach, where we calculated the roughness parameters
with the true altitude values (in terms of elevation above sea
level). That is why we decided on the absolute altitude values
for the two approaches—one with the absolute building height
(i.e., four-storey building ∼ 12 m) and one with true altitude in
terms with the local lowest point detected in Warsaw (i.e., two
buildings with the same absolute building height, but laying on
top and below the escarpment would differ in height attribute
by the DEM value). The choice of these data ensured that we
account for topography and vegetation, as opposed to previous
studies.
B. Methods
To describe the turbulent air motion during the neutral at-
mospheric stratification, the logarithmic wind law is used [46],
which is based on the idealized wind speed profile relations
(1) [28] and only two roughness parameters. Yet, as Kent and
Grimmond [28] report, exactly those morphometric methods
resemble the most wind speeds estimated up to 200 m above
the canopy layer in central London, even with 25% mean wind
speed uncertainty.
In order to calculate these parameters, we adopted the ap-
proach proposed by Gál and Unger [15] and created corre-
sponding lot-areas for each obstacle—including buildings and
vegetation—for the whole city. Since a cadastral database could
not be used and we believe that the grid approach (as in [11] and
[47]) is also flawed (due to the fact that cities are rarely based
on a regular grid), we created lot-areas based on the Voronoi
approach, as in Fig. 2(a) and (b). They were essential for the
process, as we relate all parameters to these lot areas and their
area accounts for AP —plan area (later used in plan area ratio).
Therefore, to illustrate the texture (roughness) of an urban
surface, the aerodynamical roughness length (z0 ) and the zero-
plane displacement height (zd ) are used in this study. The ap-
proach, modified after Bottema [24], [48], includes the calcula-
tion of frontal area index (used as an input for zd calculation),
which is derived from
n
AF i
λF = i=1 (2)
AT
where AF represents frontal area (facade) of an obstacle, and
AT —lot area.
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WICHT AND WICHT: LIDAR-BASED APPROACH FOR URBAN VENTILATION CORRIDORS MAPPING
Fig. 2. Development process of lot areas: (a) Calculating Voronoi polygons
for each polygon vertex; (b) computed lot areas; (c) lot areas overlaid with
parallel lines for λF computation.
In order to derive λF , we had to determine facade length for
different directions, as presented in Fig. 3. Depending on the
wind direction, the frontal area of an obstacle varies. The same
building or vegetation might block more wind from the east
than from the southwest. To detect these facades for various
wind directions, we superimposed our study area with a set of
parallel lines—Fig. 2(c). For each Voronoi polygon, a number
of “hits” on the facade is calculated and multiplied by the inter-
val. Other studies [15], [30] used an interval of 5 m, however,
5
Fig. 3. Lot, building, and vegetation statistics required for roughness param-
eters calculation.
these were focused only on building obstacles, which tend to be
wider than 5 m. It still is a compromise between accuracy and
computational time. We decided to decrease this interval to 3 m,
as we also wanted to detect the trees’ facades. The lines were
defined for eight (inter) cardinal wind directions, to take many
wind flow directions and different facades into account. λF was
calculated per each lot area corresponding to each obstacle for
eight directions.
Once the frontal area index was retrieved, we could calculate
roughness length and displacement height. The roughness length
describes the relationship between the wind and the drag force
and, as Bottema reports [24], [48], can be modeled by
 
κ
z0 = (h − zd ) exp − √ (3)
0.5CD λF
where κ—von Karman’s constant 0.4 [19], CD —drag coeffi-
cient, λF —frontal area index.
Zero-plane displacement height is the height at which wind
speed drops to zero because of obstacles in its way and is derived
from
zd = h(λP )0.6 (4)
where h stands for volumetrically averaged building height and
λP is the plan-area ratio.
In general, roughness parameters demonstrate how efficiently
wind travels above the specified canopy layer, which was cru-
cial for this study. However, in many studies, (3) is usually
approximated and some constants are neglected and written in a
simpler form (as in [15]). We wanted to differentiate as much as
possible between the porous (vegetation) and bluff (buildings)
obstacles. Besides the porosity index, described below, the drag
created by vegetation varies in comparison to the bluff body
with the similar structure. As Kent and Grimmond [28] argue,
this drag difference cannot be satisfied with simple frontal area
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6 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
Fig. 4. Spatial distribution of zero-displacement height (zd ), roughness length (z0 ) and porosity (P) for: (a) Flat terrain approach and (b) topography consideration.
Fig. 5. Possible ventilation corridors in two approaches: Flat and with topog-
raphy consideration.
index decrease. It should rather settled separately for buildings
and vegetation. Although the drag coefficient itself is a complex
matter and is dependent on many variables (foliage type or a
season), we decided to utilize an averaged value from other nu-
merical studies—0.2 [28] for the vegetation and 0.8 [15] for the
building layer.
Another parameter that we wanted to include in our modeling
was the porosity value. As mentioned before, bluff and porous
bodies influence wind and can penetrate investigated area dif-
ferently. We believe that this index is of value, as the vegetation
does not “block” the air flow completely, yet it slows it down
significantly depending on the wind speed, vegetation density
and type, and wind direction [49]. Gál and Unger [15] define
porosity as the ratio of air volume to UCL volume to the same
reference area and derive it from
AT h − V
P = (5)
AT h
where h is the mean urban/vegetation height derived from the
entire study area, V is the volume of the building/vegetation. The
last parameter, volume, was also decreased, as the vegetation
volume is significantly lower in comparison to the building
volume. We approximated that a tree with similar dimensions
of a bluff body has only 40% of the original bluff body volume.
Once all parameters (z0 , zd , and P) were calculated per lot
area, we wanted to normalize them. Ratti et al. [50] suggest
averaging the results; however, we felt that the real wind shares
should be considered. Therefore, we averaged the results ac-
cording to the prevailing winds, as seen in Fig. 1.
1) Potential Ventilation Corridor Mapping: Previous stud-
ies [39] suggest certain requirements of the potential ventilation
corridors that a given area has to meet. Gál and Unger summa-
rized it in [15] and for the purpose of this study, we considered
the most important three (for the roughness parameters):
1) roughness length lower than 0.5 m;
2) negligible zero-plane displacement (lower than 3);
3) at least 50 m width.
As for the porosity, the index takes values between 0 and
1, 0 meaning the flow is blocked and 1 the air flows without
the obstruction. We tested several possibilities for the poros-
ity threshold and after reviewing Kents [28] discussion on the
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WICHT AND WICHT: LIDAR-BASED APPROACH FOR URBAN VENTILATION CORRIDORS MAPPING 7

TABLE II
POTENTIAL VENTILATION AREAS (KILOMETER) WITHIN CORRIDORS FROM
1992 AND 2006 IN TWO APPROACHES

Flat Topo

ID 1992 2006 1992 2006

1+4 16.57 41.7% 27.64 69.8% 14.86 37.5% 23.00 34.7%

2 5.55 0.0% 0.00 0.0% 5.47 34.1% 0.00 0.0%
3 0.99 28.9% 1.57 36.4% 0.34 7.9% 0.78 14.4%
5 1.59 25.2% 2.74 24.5% 1.10 9.9% 1.59 14.6%
6 5.07 61.4% 6.66 98.1% 3.52 51.9% 4.65 42.9%
7 1.44 16.0% 1.81 20.9% 0.84 9.8% 1.07 9.5%
8 1.82 34.2% 1.42 38.4% 1.01 27.3% 0.83 20.1%
9 2.41 60.7% 2.22 36.9% 1.73 28.9% 1.54 42.3%
10 0.00 16.5% 1.19 13.1% 0.00 0.0% 0.98 13.6%
Sum 35.45 45.24 28.88 34.45

This comparison shows clearly how sensitive the aerodynamical

Fig. 6. Community gardens as a difference example between two approaches
in detected ventilation corridors.
various tree types and leaf on/off season, we averaged the value
to 0.6.
In order to meet condition 3, we decided to transform the
Voronoi polygons into a 50 m × 50 m grid. Most studies simply
average the Voronoi value depending on the share in grid, we
wanted however to move forward and distinguish between areas
that are blocked or not. There is a certain flaw to the Voronoi ap-
proach, which can be resolved in this step. Lot-areas are created
corresponding to each obstacle, which means that theoretically
the whole city is covered with Voronoi polygons with computed
parameter values. It means that even some larger, open soil or
lawns, meadows, etc., would, theoretically, be assigned an over-
estimated roughness value. Therefore, in the gridding step, we
excluded all of the grids that in fact do not intersect any of the
obstacles (buildings or vegetation) and appointed the value be-
low the conditions specified in [39]. This allowed us to detect
the potential ventilation corridors even more accurately.
Once we ran the calculation for both approaches (flat-terrain
assumption and topographic), we were able to compare their
results.
IV. RESULTS
The visual evaluation of the spatial variability of the three
parameters is presented in Fig. 4. We can easily distinguish
between the flat [see Fig. 4(a)] and the topography approach
[see Fig. 4 (b)], as the Vistula riverbed is easily recognizable.
roughness length is (zd ) to the height attribute, as the values in-
creased rapidly, once the absolute local altitude was calculated.
The zero-plane displacement height computation has shown sat-
isfactory results in variation between bluff and porous bodies—
large forests in the south and southwest part of Warsaw are
clearly visible, even in the topography approach.
The porosity values, on the other hand, show a slightly differ-
ent spatial pattern. The riverbed is still clearly visible, but some
areas show much better values in comparison to z0 and zd . It
gives us some additional information on the type of obstacle—
whereas roughness parameters focus mainly on the height. Still,
the large woodland areas show decreased porosity, which was
expected.
In potential ventilation corridors mapping, we applied the
conditions suggested by Matzarakis et al. in [39] and applied
multiple times ever since, however, that study from 1992 was
also based on the relative building heights. It is visible, how the
conditions that were set are incredibly height-sensitive. Natu-
rally, to describe the geometry, or roughness of a surface, the
height of the obstacles is crucial. Still, so is the topography.
When aforementioned (in Section III-B1) conditions were ap-
plied, we retrieved 102.9 km2 for the flat and 72.5 km2 for the
topography approach, which sums up to 19.9% and 14% of
the Warsaw area. All possible ventilation areas for the two ap-
proaches are visible in Fig. 5. Altogether, a significant greater
detection can be seen for the flat approach. When we investi-
gated some of the areas that increased in roughness and porosity
indices values in the flat approach, we concluded that the biggest
areawise differences were due to the community gardens, as seen
in Fig. 6.
In comparison to our former studies, thanks to refining the grid
outcome with obstacle-intersection information, we were able to
detect much smaller and finer corridors, which actually may help
with ventilation. Apart from the Jerozolimski corridor (whose
name originates from the Jerozolimskie Alley), other significant
transportation routes have been detected in our current approach.
In the northern part, we can see the S8 (E67) route contour, as
well as main railway axis—connecting corridor 3 and 8.
Generally, increased detection was also visible in the single,
predefined corridors. As seen in Table II, the biggest differences
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
8 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
between the approaches can be seen in corridor 6 (Mokotowski),
8 (West Railway), and 3 (East Railway). As we studied these
changes, we also noticed that it was mostly high vegetation that
was excluded in the calculation. In Mokotowski corridor, the
difference can be as high as 22% and covers vast high vegeta-
tion areas stretching from Chopin Airport up to the Wygledów
˛ was actually “over detecting” the potential ventilation areas, as it
housing estate. A very similar process is visible for both rail-
ways corridors: in each case between 15% and 22% is lost to
the high vegetation.
In general, the inclusion of vegetation in our calculation has
changed the outcome a lot. In our previous approaches, such
as in [30] and [40], the minimum percentage of well-ventilated
areas in a corridor was not lower than 25% and for Vistula cor-
ridor it reached even 92%. Overall detection of well-ventilated
areas within existing corridors reached more than 60%, whereas
inclusion of topography, vegetation, and bluff/porous bodies de-
creased it to little over 40% (see Table II). On average, 60% of
all corridors areas were covered with well-ventilated areas. This
has significantly decreased now, since even the Vistula corridor
efficiency lies between 34% and 42%, depending on the ap-
proach. Surprisingly, the best performing corridor—according
to our analysis—is Mokotowski corridor. It has the highest share
of well-ventilated areas.
One more negative process is visible from the data. In 2006,
the city council decided to withdraw from the Bródnowski (2)
corridor at the gain of the Northern Railway corridor. Our anal-
ysis has shown—independent from the approach chosen—that
whereas around 35% of Bródnowski corridor was still function-
ing, it was only true for around 15% of the Northern Railway
corridor. Even more important notice is that the latter does not
have any access to the supply areas, which directly weakens its
performance.
V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The results above show how we can use roughness and poros-
ity parameters in defining potential urban ventilation corridors.
The proposed new approach includes vegetation—as an impor-
tant variable in the wind speed decrease—and the topography
of the terrain.
In our current study, we wanted to compare an existing ap-
proach (for over 20 years) in mapping potential ventilation cor-
ridors with our new concept. In order to retrieve both vegetation
and topography information, we utilized LiDAR data. We de-
liberately used the local absolute altitude—treating the lowest
detected point in Warsaw as local zero—as we wanted to in-
clude topography in our calculation, yet did not want to work
in true altitude values. Such increase in height attribute value
generated lower detection rate, in comparison to the flat ap-
proach. In many detailed investigated areas, it turned out, that
the “blocked” areas (in flat detected as free) were community
gardens. Examples, Fig. 6(a)–(c) focuses on the three biggest
contrasting areas. The fact that these are community gardens
makes it worth considering—such areas are usually character-
ized by low roughness and one might think that they contribute
overall to the air flow. This under-detection may result from
two issues: either the roughness parameters are too sensitive to
height, and some larger parks and small huts are being detected
as blocking area, or the porosity threshold was set too low. In ad-
dition, whereas for all corridors negative changes are noticeable
for the topographical approach (under-detection), it must not
mean a flaw in the calculation. Perhaps, the previous approach
did not account for the high vegetation effect. Regardless of the
reason, we question the validity of the conditions proposed over
20 years ago, in an era, where we have relatively easy access
to high accuracy DSM data and we can efficiently implement
it. We believe that including the topographic information yields
better results, they need, however, to be followed up by the in
situ measurements to assess the proper adjustment.
Second of all, we plan to further investigate the porosity in-
dex. In this study, we utilized the approach suggested by Gál
and Unger [15] and varied the volume value (decreased by a
constant) for the vegetation and building layer. We are aware,
however, that porosity is highly complex matter and has many
uncertainties—season (leaf-on versus leaf-off), vegetation type
(coniferous versus deciduous and deciduous species), density or
depth of a patch in a given wind direction. Given the spatial vari-
ability of large woodland areas and the fact that forest account
for 14% of whole Warsaw, we believe that more detailed inves-
tigation of the high vegetation influence on the urban ventilation
is highly required.
One very important matter must still be studied in greater de-
tail. Whereas our analysis delivered the overall share of the areas
that might promote the air flow, we did not regard their dimen-
sions and continuity. The only aspect applied was the minimum
width of 50 m. In our further studies, we plan to investigate the
length of each patch (Matzarakis et al. [39] suggest the width has
to be substantial, at least 1000 m in one direction). Second mea-
sure worth considering is connectivity with other potential cor-
ridors but as well with the supply fields. Some areas do show po-
tential (such as the southern part of the Northern Railway corri-
dor), yet they lack connection to the supply fields (such as forests
or meadows) and, therefore, loose the most important feature
of the ventilation corridor—bringing fresh and cool air into the
city. That is also directly connected with the investigation of
potential pollutants located in the direct neighborhood or in the
supply fields. Some areas in Warsaw are not connected to any of
the CHPs and, therefore, large parts of the single-family houses
there are using gas or coal stoves for heating. This phenomenon
is even worse for the western municipalities outside Warsaw—
such as Ożarów Mazowiecki or Pruszków. This poses potentially
an even bigger threat, since the prevailing wind directions for
Warsaw are western. It could mean that ventilation corridors
might transport even worse air to the city center. For this reason,
we want to expand our study area and locate the possible threats
and distinguish which areas are suitable for air regeneration.
On the way to adapt to climate change, cities have devel-
oped many mitigation strategies—increasing surface albedo,
decreasing impervious areas share or increasing urban green ar-
eas. Locating potential urban ventilation corridors bears many
advantages—wind flow increases our thermal comfort, sinks
the air temperature, disperses the air pollution and joins the
aforementioned mitigation measures. In addition, such areas
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
WICHT AND WICHT: LIDAR-BASED APPROACH FOR URBAN VENTILATION CORRIDORS MAPPING
not only contribute to the city’s climate, they also increase our
standard of living. We strongly believe that results from our
studies might be used by local planners, who may find any
wastelands or unoccupied land and buildings along these paths
and secure them to promote the air flow in the city. Since urban
climates are likely to worsen, and the number of urban inhabi-
tants is rising, we should use any means necessary to change this
tendency.
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Marzena Wicht received the M.Sc. degree in spa-
tial planning in 2012 from the Warsaw University
of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, where she has been
working toward the Ph.D. degree in research concen-
trated on the spatial morphometric methodology to
derive and evaluate urban ventilation corridors with
the Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing
and GIS, Faculty of Geodesy and Cartography, since
2012.
She has also been involved with the Z_GIS De-
partment of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg,
Salzburg, Austria, and the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt,
Germany. Her research interests include urban areas and processes that occur
there, in particular, how violent weather events affect cities, how urban climate
might be improved by appropriate spatial planning, and how remote sensing can
be used in these cases.
Mrs. Wicht’s research work has gained an international approval expressed
in one-year DAAD scholarship, and the Best Student Paper Awards at the Joint
Urban Remote Sensing Event 2017 and the SPIE Remote Sensing 2017.
Andreas Wicht received the M.Eng. degree in geoin-
formation and public works from the Frankfurt Uni-
versity of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, Germany, in
2012.
From 2011 to 2014, he held positions as a Project
Engineer and Research Assistant with the Frankfurt
University of Applied Sciences. He is currently a
part of the Geodata Science Team, GfK Geomarket-
ing GmbH, Bruchsal, Germany.