Advancing Understanding of Urban Weather and Climate

The world is rapidly urbanising with more than 50% residents currently living in cities. The high degree of urbanisation put high demands on understanding urban meteorology in order to provide reliable forecasts for the urban heat island, for human thermal comfort, and for energy demand planning. In turn this requires understanding of the surface energy and radiation budgets of the complex urban environments. This presentation will address how high density urban observational networks unravel the dynamics of the urban weather and climate. Moreover, a novel NWP forecasting system at neighbourhood scale will be presented for the city of Amsterdam, as well as the role of field observations for validation of the modelling system. In addition, the advancements to utilize crowdsourcing to observe the urban weather and climate will be discussed.