Simulations of the Montreal urban heat island
Abstract
The current population of Montreal is around 3.8 million and this numberis projected to go up in the coming years to decades, which will lead tovast expansion of urban areas. It is well known that urban morphologyimpacts weather and climate, and therefore should be taken intoconsideration in urban planning. This is particularly important in thecontext of a changing climate, as the intensity and frequency oftemperature extremes such as hot spells are projected to increase infuture climate, and Urban Heat Island (UHI) can potentially raise alreadystressful temperatures during such events, which can have significanteffects on human health and energy consumption. High-resolution regionalclimate model simulations can be utilized to understand betterurban-weather/climate interactions in current and future climates,particularly the spatio-temporal characteristics of the Urban Heat Islandand its impact on other weather/climate characteristics such as urbanflows, precipitation etc. This paper will focus on two high-resolution(250 m) simulations performed with (1) the Canadian Land Surface Scheme(CLASS) and (2) CLASS and TEB (Town Energy Balance) model; TEB is a singlelayer urban canopy model and is used to model the urban fractions. The twosimulations are performed over a domain covering Montreal for the1960-2015 period, driven by atmospheric forcing data coming from ahigh-resolution Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5) simulation, drivenby ERA-Interim. The two simulations are compared to assess the impact ofurban regions on selected surface fields and the simulation with bothCLASS and TEB is then used to study the spatio-temporal characteristics ofthe UHI over the study domain. Some preliminary results from a coupledsimulation, i.e. CRCM5+CLASS+TEB, for selected years, including extremewarm years, will also be presented.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.B33H0717R
- Keywords:
-
- 3322 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 0493 Urban systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1615 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 6334 Regional planning;
- POLICY SCIENCES