Recent Enhancements to the Integrated WRF-Urban Modeling System

The integrated Weather Research and Forecast (WRF)-Urban modeling system includes three urban parameterization schemes ranging from a simple bulk model to a sophisticated multi-layer urban canopy model. It has been widely used for fine-scale modeling applications (with a grid spacing of 1~4 km) and provides high-resolution meteorological conditions for air quality, transport, and dispersion models over urban areas. Also, the research communities have used it to address emerging issues related to urban weather, climate, public health, and adaptation and mitigation. To satisfy increasing community demand for integrated modeling and assessment tool, numerous efforts have been taken to develop and evaluate new WRF-Urban components. This presentation provides a synthesized overview of those efforts and focuses on, but not limited to, the following WRF-Urban modeling aspects: 1) hydrological enhancements accounting for effects of lawn irrigation, urban oasis, evaporation from pavements, and anthropogenic moisture sources; 2) green-roof parameterization; 3) building energy model; 4) optimized urban parameters used in WRF single-layer urban canopy model; 5) urban-parameter data set based on the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT) consisting data from US 44 cities; 6) new capability of diagnosing air temperature in Urbanized High Resolution Land Data Assimilation System (U-HRLDAS), and 7) tile-mosaic approach to treat subgrid-scale surface heterogeneity in urbanized areas. We will discuss results with regard to the application of these mesoscale urban modeling capabilities.