Thursday, 23 May 2002: 8:30 AM
Urban canopy modelling influence on urban boundary layer simulation
The complexity of urban climatology is mainly due to the surface
heterogeneity of, e.g., roughness, land use, etc. Thus the urban climatology
is composed of many microclimates in the various urban quarters. Mesoscale
models integrate the surface heterogeneities within each grid cell: it
thus appears important to evaluate the influence of the representation
of canopy and soil in urban areas in the simulations of the Urban Boundary
Layer (UBL).
Here, the urban soil model, SM2-U, is coupled with the French communal
model SUBMESO. This model, SUBMESO, initially derived from ARPS 3.0, is
mainly developed for simulating the atmospheric boundary layer with very
high resolution. SM2-U is an extension to the urban surfaces of the rural
soil model SM2-ISBA previously derived from the force-restore model of
Noilhan & Planton (1989). SM2-U considers 5 cover modes: natural soil,
bare soil, artificial soil, building roofs, and water surfaces. Three soil
layers are considered, a superficial layer for the non urbanized surfaces,
a second soil layer representing the influence zone of the vegetation roots,
and a third layer used as a water reservoir for the second layer during
the dryness period. In each computational cell, the model determines a
surface temperature and a specific humidity of the apparent surface for
each of the 5 cover modes, and computes their average according to the
cover fraction. The urban canopy influence is considered within the surface
temperature equation of the artificial soil by introducing the heat storage
by buildings walls, and by taking into account the radiative trapping with
a street canyon effective albedo parameterization deduced from the work
of Masson (2000).
Coupling SUBMESO and SM2-U is tested above a hypothetic city, with
a flat ground and infinite lateral extension (periodic boundary conditions).
Simulations are carried out on a diurnal cycle starting at midnight. Dynamics
and thermodynamics inside the computational domain are forced only by the
ground fluxes. Three simulations are compared. In the first one, the city
is composed of 4 quarters: residential, high rise buildings, city center,
and industrial-commercial quarter. In the second simulation, the city is
represented by a single quarter averaging the four preceding quarters.
In the third one, the waterproof surfaces in the first simulation are replaced
by a dry bare soil. The results of the first simulation illustrate the
influence of each urban quarter on the ABL structure, and the generation
of heat island effect, whereas the case of the averaged city shows a decrease
of the urban area impact on the ABL structure, and a decrease of the heat
island intensity. The results of the third simulation show the difficulty
to reproduce the urban effects by using only the rural parts of SM2-U.
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