Chapter 20
On the Urban Canopy Effects in Regional
Climate Simulations—An Inter-Model
Comparison and Potential for Prediction
Tomas Halenka, Peter Huszar, Michal Belda, Jan Karlicky
and Tereza Novakova
Abstract To assess the impact of cities and urban surfaces on climate, the modeling
approach is often used with inclusion of urban parameterization in land-surface
interactions. This is especially important when going to higher resolution, which is
common trend both in operational weather prediction and regional climate modelling.
Inclusion of urban related effects can differ significantly across the land-surface
models and urban canopy parameterizations. For adaptation and mitigation measures
applied in big cities, especially in connection to climate change perspective, it is
important to assess this uncertainty as well as to analyse the effects, which can
affect air quality situation within the cities. These are main tasks of the new project
URBI PRAGENSI. We performed experiments to assess urban effects on climate
over central Europe for the decade 2001–2010, using two regional climate models
(RegCM4 and WRF) in 10 km resolution driven by ERA-Interim reanalyses, three
surface schemes (BATS and CLM4.5 for RegCM4 and Noah for WRF) and five
urban canopy parameterizations available: one bulk urban scheme, three single layer
and a multilayer urban scheme.
20.1 Introduction
The role of cities is increasing and will continue to increase in future, as the population
within urban areas is growing faster. More than 50% of world population has been
living in cities, the number of big cities is steadily growing and the outlook for 2030
is more than 60% population in cities above 300,000 [21]. In Europe, it is now about
75%, and about 84% of population shall be living in urban areas in the middle of 21st
century. It means that weather and climate change effects are affecting significant
and increasing part of population via urban environment.
T. Halenka (B) · P. Huszar · M. Belda · J. Karlicky · T. Novakova
Department of Atmospheric Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University,
182 00 Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: tomas.halenka@mff.cuni.cz
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
C. Mensink et al. (eds.), Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXVI,
Springer Proceedings in Complexity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22055-6_20
119
On the Urban Canopy Effects in Regional
Climate Simulations—An Inter-Model
Comparison and Potential for Prediction
Tomas Halenka, Peter Huszar, Michal Belda, Jan Karlicky
and Tereza Novakova
Abstract To assess the impact of cities and urban surfaces on climate, the modeling
approach is often used with inclusion of urban parameterization in land-surface
interactions. This is especially important when going to higher resolution, which is
common trend both in operational weather prediction and regional climate modelling.
Inclusion of urban related effects can differ significantly across the land-surface
models and urban canopy parameterizations. For adaptation and mitigation measures
applied in big cities, especially in connection to climate change perspective, it is
important to assess this uncertainty as well as to analyse the effects, which can
affect air quality situation within the cities. These are main tasks of the new project
URBI PRAGENSI. We performed experiments to assess urban effects on climate
over central Europe for the decade 2001–2010, using two regional climate models
(RegCM4 and WRF) in 10 km resolution driven by ERA-Interim reanalyses, three
surface schemes (BATS and CLM4.5 for RegCM4 and Noah for WRF) and five
urban canopy parameterizations available: one bulk urban scheme, three single layer
and a multilayer urban scheme.
20.1 Introduction
The role of cities is increasing and will continue to increase in future, as the population
within urban areas is growing faster. More than 50% of world population has been
living in cities, the number of big cities is steadily growing and the outlook for 2030
is more than 60% population in cities above 300,000 [21]. In Europe, it is now about
75%, and about 84% of population shall be living in urban areas in the middle of 21st
century. It means that weather and climate change effects are affecting significant
and increasing part of population via urban environment.
T. Halenka (B) · P. Huszar · M. Belda · J. Karlicky · T. Novakova
Department of Atmospheric Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University,
182 00 Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: tomas.halenka@mff.cuni.cz
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
C. Mensink et al. (eds.), Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXVI,
Springer Proceedings in Complexity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22055-6_20
119