Calculating solar radiation values for vertical surfaces

[jeffreyjohnson2]

I am currently working with ArcGIS 10.2 with 3D analyst as well as a trial version of CityEngine 2014.1 to try and derive a single solar radiation value/average for each building of a scene.  I have run the solar radiation tool in the spatial analyst within ArcMap- having converted the feature class to a raster- but need to somehow incorporate shadowing effects from neighboring buildings onto the target building's facades.  I am aware that there are several journal articles available that highlight differing, rather complex techniques to accomplish this task but am curious to know if this community knows of a simpler method for doing so.  So far in CityEngine I have the 3D scene constructed from which I would like to run an analysis but am stumped as to how to move forward. 

thanks,

>Jeff J

[jeffreyjohnson2]

Well it's been about 6 months and I still don't have any ideas as to how to move forward and don't know if 10.3 has any additional tools or methods to estimate solar radiation on a facade.  The 2D model gets me close but cannot move forward until I can get a reasonable estimation on each facade...I've created a point feature class at varying heights and ran the feature to raster tool for each 'layer' and performed the solar radiation tool but the precision just isn't there for each point to output a usable data set.  When imported into ArcScene and symbolized accordingly the data looks decent- each point displaying a value that you would expect taking into account shading-but cannot get a true representative sample for each facade at varying heights.  Any ideas would be more than welcome at this point as I am close to lighting my computer on fire and joining the circus.

thanks,

jeff j

[NathanStocker]

Hi Jeff,

Sounds like a cool idea what you're trying to do.

Have you seen the 3DCity workflows? The one on analysis has a workflow to put points onto facades in CityEngine, which can then be used to perform 3D analysis in ArcGIS.

http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=84a432d1b26d4fbfac3b0feb3359fa12

Not sure how it would work with taking neighbouring buildings into account, perhaps it could work if you made a raster from the 3D building dataset on top of the terrain.

Not sure if this will help, haven't done this myself yet.

Thanks

Nathan