Abstract
Prompted with the ongoing and projected climate change, a wide range of cities have committed, not only to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions but also to implement different climate change adaptation measures. These measures serve to ensure the well-being of the urban population. In practice, however, the planning of realistic adaptation measures is a complex process. Prior to starting such endeavor, it may therefore be useful to explore the maximum potential benefit that can be gained through adaptation measures. In this work, simple, extreme yet realistic adaptation measures are proposed in terms of changes in albedo and vegetation fraction. The impact of these land-use scenarios is explored by use of the land surface model SURFEX on the summer climate in terms of heat waves and the urban heat island for the city of Brussels. This is done for different periods in the future using the greenhouse gas scenario RCP8.5.
Highlights
Impacts on society of the ongoing global warming are already apparent, for instance through the increase of extreme events (Masson-Delmotte et al, 2018)
It is clear that the differences among the different periods are very small and similar findings appear when studying the different adaptation scenarios
At least in the current model setup, the UHI is not affected by the time period considered, the background temperatures will be steadily increasing with time following the RCP8.5 scenario and reach 3°C to 4°C at the end of the century
Summary
Impacts on society of the ongoing global warming are already apparent, for instance through the increase of extreme events (Masson-Delmotte et al, 2018). The European heat wave in 2003, for example, resulted in an excess mortality of 70.000 deaths (Robine et al 2008). The increase in average temperature over most European regions exceeds the one of the global average and this is projected to continue (Jacob et al, 2018). Heat waves will become longer and more intense (Jacob et al, 2014; Guerreiro et al, 2018). Among all weather-related hazards, heat waves are projected to have the largest impact on human lives over Europe (Forzieri et al, 2017). Temperature extremes are known to be stronger given the
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