Coupling detailed urban energy and water budgets with TEB-Hydro model: Towards an assessment tool for nature based solution performances

Abstract

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly promoted to mitigate urbanization effects, such as the urban heat island. The release of latent heat requires the availability of water in the urban soils. Models able to represent both detailed water and energy budgets are needed for a reliable evaluation of NBSs performances. The TEB-Hydro model is a recent hydro-microclimate model that extends the physics of the urban microclimate model TEB-Veg to water processes in urban subsoil in order to represent more realistically coupled water and energy budgets. Hence, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the TEB-Hydro model regarding how the water processes affect the energy balance. The model is applied to an urban French catchment for which both hydrological and microclimate data are continuously collected. The model shows general good performances in both simulating latent and sensible heat fluxes. Nevertheless, soil water contents are slightly underestimated during wet periods and overestimated during dry periods. Compared to the previous version of the model (TEB-Veg) with a simplified water budget, TEB-Hydro tends to more overestimate latent heat fluxes than TEB-Veg during dry periods. During wet periods, however, TEB-Hydro simulates better sensible heat fluxes and latent heat fluxes.