3D Cities Solar Analyst

[AminHammad]

In the introduction section for solar analysis in ArcGIS 3D cities, it is mentioned that the process performs the solar analysis on 3D buildings, also in the assigning average solar radiation values it seems that the process considers roofs and walls but at the end as the sample building image shows, solar radiation considered for roofs only! So does this tool evaluate the solar radiation also for facades or just the rooftops?

[larryzhang]

Amin,

I roughly tested it, which looks that the tool itself can work on rooftops and/ or walls (facades), because it relies on your selection in advance.

Just share below for reference:

· On PV application, some good Solar models like SurfSun3D offer accurate and efficient approach to estimate solar potentials (urban 3D buildings rooftops & walls) in open-source GRASS GIS. https://beststpbstucourse.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/an-open-source-3d-solar-radiation-model-integr...

· Google Project Sunroof presents another effective way to estimate solar potentials for many of US cities (urban buildings), which combines 3D DSM (from stereo airphotos or WorldView-3) with a cut-edge algorithm ‘Random sample consensus’, which sounds wonderful (just not sure if those estimations are accurate enough). https://google.com/get/sunroof/data-explorer-methodology.pdf