The global urban building height to building side length and roof albedo data for urban modeling

This dataset provides global urban building height-to-building side length ratio (HL_BLD) and roof albedo (ALB_ROOF) parameters for urban land surface and urban canopy modeling. The dataset is designed to support the representation of urban morphology and radiative properties in large-scale urban climate simulations.

The HL_BLD variable represents the ratio of building height to building side length, which is used to describe the three-dimensional morphology of urban building structures. Two versions of HL_BLD are provided, derived from different combinations of global building morphology datasets:

• Li_GBFP: HL_BLD calculated using building height/fraction from Li-BUILT and building footprint from 3D-GloBFP.
• GHSL_GBFP: HL_BLD calculated using building height/fraction from GHSL and building footprint from 3D-GloBFP.

The ALB_ROOF variable provides roof albedo parameters for urban radiative transfer calculations. Two versions of roof albedo data are included:

• Roof albedo based on Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification.
• Roof albedo based on the NCAR urban classification.

All variables are stored in NetCDF format using 5° × 5° spatial tiles. Each file follows the naming convention:

RG_latn_lonw_lats_lone.Data_name.nc

where latn, lonw, lats, and lone indicate the northern latitude, western longitude, southern latitude, and eastern longitude boundaries of the tile, respectively, and Data_name indicates the corresponding variable and data source.