History of numerical urban meteorological-modeling "Invited"

San Jose, California USA Urban areas alter atmospheric energy and moisture balances to create weather patterns and climates different from those in surrounding areas. This presentation thus first reviews the history of numerical urban boundary layer models, from the 1-D PBL model of Myrup, 2-D vertical plane models, 3-D canyon energy formulations, 3-D barrier-block models, and up to the current 3-D urban PBL porous-flow formulation of Martilli now in uWRF, discussing their successes and limitations, and showing their applications to urban weather, climate, air quality, and climate change. The presentation finally reviews existing problem areas present in all mesomet models (e.g., PBL height determination, deep soil temperature, initial-condition soil moisture, stable-SBL formulations, non-local PBL formulations, spurious wave formation in the “terra incognita” turbulence region) and well as those specific to urban mesomet models (e.g., determination of input building morphological data-fields, inputting aerosol-size distributions, small-scale FDDA, linkage to CFD urban-canyon models).