Abstract
Urban canopy parameters (UCPs) are essential in order to accurately model the complex interplay between urban areas and their environment. This study compares three different approaches to define the UCPs for Moscow (Russia), using the COSMO numerical weather prediction and climate model coupled to TERRA_URB urban parameterization. In addition to the default urban description based on the global datasets and hard-coded constants (1), we present a protocol to define the required UCPs based on Local Climate Zones (LCZs) (2) and further compare it with a reference UCP dataset, assembled from OpenStreetMap data, recent global land cover data and other satellite imagery (3). The test simulations are conducted for contrasting summer and winter conditions and are evaluated against a dense network of in-situ observations. For the summer period, advanced approaches (2) and (3) show almost similar performance and provide noticeable improvements with respect to default urban description (1). Additional improvements are obtained when using spatially varying urban thermal parameters instead of the hard-coded constants. The LCZ-based approach worsens model performance for winter however, due to the underestimation of the anthropogenic heat flux (AHF). These results confirm the potential of LCZs in providing internationally consistent urban data for weather and climate modelling applications, as well as supplementing more comprehensive approaches. Yet our results also underline the continued need to improve the description of built-up and impervious areas and the AHF in urban parameterizations.
Highlights
Urban-induced meteorological effects such as the well-known urban heat island (UHI) [1]have been a primary focus in the urban climate research community
This study extends the philosophy of Local Climate Zones (LCZs)-derived urban canopy parameters (UCPs) to the COSMO limited-area atmospheric model and its climate version COSMO-CLM [35] coupled to the TERRA_URB urban parameterization developed by Wouters et al [36]
We present an open-source tool “World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to COSMO” (W2C) that translates and regrids LCZ maps to UCPs required for TERRA_URB, which is evaluated using a series of numerical experiments over the megacity of Moscow (Russia)
Summary
Urban-induced meteorological effects such as the well-known urban heat island (UHI) [1]have been a primary focus in the urban climate research community. The role of cities in climate adaptation and mitigation practices is acknowledged to be a core part of global initiatives, with a need for reliable climate and meteorological observations, modelling capabilities and associated services to support disaster risk management, urban planning and governance [2,3,4,5]. Atmosphere 2020, 11, 1349; doi:10.3390/atmos11121349 www.mdpi.com/journal/atmosphere (NWP) applications [6,7], regional-scale heat stress assessments, and the development of sustainable urban areas safeguarding livability in cities [8,9]. Despite recent advances in building-resolving urban atmospheric models [10,11], it is still not possible to integrate such fine-scale approaches into an operational NWP or long-term regional and global climate models. -called urban canopy models (UCMs) are used to parameterize the interactions between the urbanised surface and the atmosphere above in meso-scale atmospheric models [12].
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