Over the last decade, the resolution of both regional and global weather forecasting models have increased to the point where the urban fraction of landuse is now resolved to various extents. This means that the weather forecasting community are now active in developing representations of the urban surface within their atmospheric models.

Although the resolution of climate change models are still not at the point where they can sufficiently resolve urban areas to investigate the impact of these environments on the climate, the local feedbacks between cities and climate are being shown to be important for understanding the true signal of climate change for urban areas. This is of interest to the climate impacts community as the majority of the World's population now live in cities.

In this presentation, we will investigate how urban models have been developed within these weather and climate models, and describe the important contributions that have been made by the work of Oke, along with the challenging questions that he has posed which have motivated the community.