Pre-processing urban landscape structure data
To construct the urban structure dataset, we used a 2008 1-meter resolution land cover dataset (City of Philadelphia, 2011), The Property Assessment dataset from the Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment (City of Philadelphia, 2015b) indicating number of floors in buildings for each tax lot in the city in tabular format, and the Philadelphia Department of Water parcels dataset. We joined the property assessment tabular data to the parcels dataset using unique parcel IDs and created a 1-meter resolution raster dataset from the Number of Floors field in the Property Assessment dataset. Number of floors were classified into three categories: lowrise (1–3 stories), midrise (4–9 stories) and highrise (>9 stories) (Larondelle et al., 2014; I. D. Stewart & Oke, 2012). We then combined it with the land cover raster dataset, by replacing all building land cover pixels with a value representing building height category to create our basic urban structure dataset.