Abstract
We examine the differences in meteorological output from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model run at 270 m horizontal resolution using 10 m, 100 m and 1 km resolution 3D neighborhood morphological inputs and with no morphological inputs. We find that the spatial variability in temperature, humidity, and other meteorological variables across the city can vary with the resolution and the coverage of the 3D urban morphological input, and that larger differences occur between simulations run without 3D morphological input and those run with some type of 3D morphology. We also find that the inclusion of input-building-defined roughness length calculations would improve simulation results further. We show that these inputs produce different patterns of heat wave spatial heterogeneity across the city of Washington, DC. These findings suggest that understanding neighborhood level urban sustainability under extreme heat waves, especially for vulnerable neighborhoods, requires attention to the representation of surface terrain in numerical weather models.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 49 |
Journal | npj Urban Sustainability |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2024 |
Funding
This research was sponsored by the DOE Office of Science as a part of the research in Multi-Sector Dynamics within the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program. It used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. The authors especially appreciate the encouragement of Integrated Multiscale Multisector Modeling (IM3) Principal Investigator, Jennie Rice, of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to perform the experiments reported here.
Funders | Funder number |
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Office of Science | |
U.S. Department of Energy |