Recent developments and evaluation of the LUMPS-NARP urban land surface scheme

The Local-scale Urban Meteorological Parameterization Scheme (LUMPS) is a simple model that simulates the urban energy balance when provided with commonly available meteorological observations and basic surface characteristics. Following recent developments, a new simple representation of the incoming component of the longwave radiation is included as part of the scheme which now also accounts for changing availability of water at the surface and seasonal variations of active vegetation (Loridan et al., 2010).The performance of this new incoming longwave radiation formulation is evaluated with radiation data from two independent sites (Lodz, Poland and Baltimore, USA) for which multi-year datasets are available and is compared to other alternatives including the original formulation implemented in LUMPS and a simpler one using the U. S. National Climatic Data Center cloud observation database as input to the model. A total of five formulations are implemented in the most up to date version of the scheme and their impact on the modelling of the surface energy balance fluxes is assessed with the Lodz dataset. The overall model performs well in this independent test over two years. Detailed analyses of biases demonstrate the utility of inclusion of the anthropogenic heat fluxes and the role of the source area.

Reference

Loridan T, CSB Grimmond, BD Offerle, DT Young, TEL Smith, L Jarvi (2010) LUMPS-NARP an urban land surface scheme: evaluation and development of a new longwave parameterization. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology (submitted).