Local Climate Zones (LCZs) and Urban Morphological Parameters Using GIS: An Application to Italian Cities

LCZs refer to a classification system that exists out of 17 classes, 10 of which can be describedas urban, proposed as the new standard for characterizing and comparing urban landscapes. Thisstudy evaluates the reliability of the LCZ level 0 map obtained from WUDAPT by comparingit with a more detailed LCZ map inferred from the morphological information of several Italiancities. Morphological data from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) are used to obtain a detailedmorphological characterization of each city. Preliminary results for the city of Lecce show that theWUDAPT L0 method misclassified some LCZs, especially at the core urban cells, whereas widermatching is observed at the boundary between urban and rural areas