Quality and sensitivity of high-resolution numerical simulation of urban heat islands

By Dan Li, E. Bou‐Zeid. 2014

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High-resolution numerical simulations of the urban heat island (UHI) effect with the widely-used Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model are assessed. Both the sensitivity of the results to the simulation setup, and the quality of the simulated fields as representations of the real world, are investigated. Results indicate that the WRF-simulated surface temperatures are more sensitive to the planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme choice during nighttime, and more sensitive to the surface thermal roughness length parameterization during daytime. The urban surface temperatures simulated by WRF are also highly sensitive to the urban canopy model (UCM) used. The implementation in this study of an improved UCM (the Princeton UCM or PUCM) that allows the simulation of heterogeneous urban facets and of key hydrological processes, together with the so-called CZ09 parameterization for the thermal roughness length, significantly reduce the bias (<1.5 °C) in the surface temperature fields as compared to satellite observations during daytime. The boundary layer potential temperature profiles are captured by WRF reasonable well at both urban and rural sites; the biases in these profiles relative to aircraft-mounted senor measurements are on the order of 1.5 °C. Changing UCMs and PBL schemes does not alter the performance of WRF in reproducing bulk boundary layer temperature profiles significantly. The results illustrate the wide range of urban environmental conditions that various configurations of WRF can produce, and the significant biases that should be assessed before inferences are made based on WRF outputs. The optimal set-up of WRF-PUCM developed in this paper also paves the way for a confident exploration of the city-scale impacts of UHI mitigation strategies in the companion paper (Li et al ).

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e363ec445301616673bb5bdf493c78571e6184e4

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Citations in the corpus

Micrometeorological simulations to predict the impacts of heat mitigation strategies on pedestrian thermal comfort in a Los Angeles neighborhood (2016, background): “Most past studies on the impacts of heat mitigation strategies have generally investigated the mesoscale meteorological consequences of hypothetical city-wide deployments of these strategies using numerical weather prediction models [14-28].”
The effectiveness of cool and green roofs as urban heat island mitigation strategies (2014, methodology): “…temperature is not the air temperature in the canyon as could be deduced from figure 1; it is rather an equivalent aerodynamic temperature that is more representative of the surface temperature of the wall and ground canyon facets (see Li and Bou-Zeid 2014 for its definition and calculation).”
Convection‐permitting modeling with regional climate models: Latest developments and next steps (2021, background): “However, Li and Bou-Zeid (2014) underlined the main challenges in identifying an optimal CPRCM experimental setup to simulate the UHI effect, which is especially sensitive to the PBL scheme during nighttime and surface roughness length parameterization during daytime.”
Climate–vegetation control on the diurnal and seasonal variations of surface urban heat islands in China (2016, background): “Therefore, understanding and mitigating UHIs have gained strong interest from scientists and urban planners and have been the subject of active research (Kolokotroni et al 2012, Li and Bou-Zeid 2013, 2014, Li et al 2014, 2015, Zhao et al 2014).”