A High-Resolution Dataset of Global Urban Fraction for Mesoscale Urban Modelling

Coupled urban-atmospheric models are extensively used to understand the urban environment and its impact on atmospheric processes. A common requirement of these models is information about the “urban fraction” (fraction of model grid covered by impervious surface area (ISA)). The European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCover product provides a global land cover map for the base year of 2020 at a spatial resolution of 10 m. The dataset is based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data with an overall accuracy of 74.4%. In this study we process the WorldCover dataset and provide a ready-to-use “urban fraction” that can be incorporated in urban modelling systems. The dataset contains GeoTIFF and Weather Research and Forecasting Pre-processing System (WRF-WPS) format files for 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.009 (~1 km), 0.0027 (~300 m), and 0.0009 (~100 m) degree spatial resolutions. The GeoTIFF files can be converted to other urban mesoscale modelling systems. Please check the README.txt for more information on using the dataset.