liam-ilan / geography-ia

An investigation into urban heat islands in Vancouver.

The Urban Heat Island Effect in Vancouver

This repo contains the paper and software used to answer the question:

Does Vancouver, a mid-latitude coastal city, have a defined urban heat island? What factors influence temperature patterns in Vancouver?

About

This repo contains my IB Geography Internal Assesment for the May 2023 examanation session. It can be found here. A large component of writing the paper involved creating isotherms and other maps. These maps were generated with Python, and can be found under /graphs.

Development

To Regenerate all the maps, run

python3 main.py graphs/building.png -bu && python3 main.py graphs/vegetation.png -ve && python3 main.py graphs/isotherm.png -co && python3 main.py graphs/tags.png -ta && python3 main.py graphs/tempratures.png -te && python3 3d.py graphs/3d-full.png -f && python3 3d.py graphs/3d-contour.png -c

The temperature, vegetation, and building data the paper is based on can be found under ./data. The satelite imagery can be found under back.png and back-bright.png.

main.py handles generation of the contour maps. To generate contour maps, run

python3 main.py path_to_output.png options

where options is

1. -co for isotherms
2. -te for individual temperatures
3. -ta for letter tags
4. -bu for buildings
5. -ve for vegetation

3d.py handles generation of the 3d maps. To generate 3d maps, run

python3 3d.py path_to_output.png options

where options is

1. -f for filled graphs
2. -c for contours

All graphs used in the paper can be found under ./graphs.

Credit

• Written by Liam Ilan
• Thanks to Christoph Heindl for his implementation of the Thin Plate Spline algorithim, used in generating contours, found under /thinplate. The repo can be found at https://github.com/cheind/py-thin-plate-spline.