Impact of urban canopy parameters on a megacity’s modelled thermal environment

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.