This data set provides physical roughness maps of vegetation canopies in the Amazon Basin. The images are estimates of aerodynamic roughness length (Z0) and zero plane displacement height (D0) at 1-km spatial resolution. The aerodynamic roughness length (Z0) is an important parameter to determine the vertical gradients of mean wind speed and the conditions for momentum transfer over a vegetated or bare rough surface.
The maps were produced from a multivariate regression model algorithm developed from field-measured vegetation structure and remote-sensing data. The data input sources included Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) (Saatchi, 2013), JERS-1, MODIS, and field data from vegetation biomass plots over the Amazon basin, as well as tower-based wind profile measurements, and roughness parameters from LBA tower sites.
There are two GeoTIFF (.tif) files with this data set.