Birmingham Urban Heat Islands during 2003 Heatwave Period Preliminary WRF/BEP Simulation

Xiaoming Cai, Richard Bassett and John E. Thornes

School of Geography, Earth and

Environmental SciencesUniversity of Birmingham

36h WRF Precip Forecast

Analyzed Precip

27 Sept. 2002

WRF is an advanced mesoscale forecast and assimilation system, and accelerate research advances into operations

• Collaborative partnership, principally among NCAR, NOAA, DoD, OU/CAPS, FAA, and university community

• Development conducted by 15 WRF Working Groups

• Ongoing active testing and rapidly growing community use

– Over 1,600 registered community users, annual workshops and tutorials for research community

• Operational implementation at NCEP and AFWA in 2004

Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)

• Three-dimensional, time varying, multi-domain nesting• State-of-the-art, transportable, and efficient in a massively parallel computing environment.• Design priority for high-resolution applications• Advanced data assimilation systems developed in tandem with the model itself.• Numerous physics options, tapping into the experience of the full modeling community.• Maintained and supported as a community mesoscale model to facilitate broad use in the research community.• Research advances will have a direct path to operations.

WRF Model Characteristics

Four nested domains are configured

Surface land data Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”) Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)

Meteorological initial and boundary conditions US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours

WRF-BEP Configuration

Configuration of the nested domains. The figure box is the boundary of Domain 1 and the embedded boxes are the boundaries of Domain 2, 3 & 4.

Domain 2

Domain 3

Domain 4

WRF-BEP Domains

Domain Lx (km)

Ly (km)

Lz (km)

Nx Ny Nz x (km)

y (km)

1 1800 1476 18 50 41 40 36 36

2 624 588 18 52 49 40 12 12

3 207 195 18 69 65 40 3 3

4 82 79 18 82 79 40 1 1

WRF-BEP Configuration

Domains 3 and 4

Configuration of the nested domains. The figure box is the boundary of Domain 3 and the embedded box is the boundaries of Domain 4.

Domain 4

Four nested domains are configured

Surface land data Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”) Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)

Meteorological initial and boundary conditions US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours

WRF-BEP Configuration

Urban type & urban fraction for Domain 4

Urban type for Domain 4:30=non-urban; 31=low intensity residential; 32=high intensity residential; 33=commercial

Urban area fraction for Domain 4:

0-100%

Four nested domains are configured

Surface land data Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”) Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)

Meteorological initial and boundary conditions US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours

WRF-BEP Configuration

Domain 2

Animation of simulation results for Domains 2 & 4

Domain 4

Temperature at 2 m above

ground

(a)2100

(b) 2200

(c) 2300

(d) 2400

Temperature field 2100-2400 GMT 4 August 2003

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Temperature field at 0000 GMT 9 August 2003

Temperature at 2 m above ground for Domain 4

Observed temperature at 3 stations 1-10 August 2003

Future work

To fine-tune the model

To validate the model

To simulate various scenarios with different lanuse types

To apply it to 2010 scenarios