The influence of urban clusters on regional hydroclimatology

Keywords: urban climate, precipitation, hydroclimatology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 48

Abstract

The urban effects on warm-season precipitation processes are well documented in cities around the globe. Case studies of individual cities and their unique urban rainfall effects constitute the vast majority of peer-reviewed research. While cities occupy a small yet increasing fraction of global land surface, they also have a disproportionate effect on global climate through fossil fuel and aerosol emissions. The fractal nature of urban growth alongside regional and national socioeconomic codependency causes the boundaries between effective urbanized areas to become blurred. A significant knowledge gap exists within this space between the local and global scales. An emerging area of research focuses on the impact of urbanization beyond individual, distinct cities and attempts to understand how cities collectively modify regional climate regimes. This study investigates numerical model simulations over the southeastern United States and seeks to determine best practices for the evaluation of land-atmosphere response spurred by cross-urbanization and adjacent rural interactions. Using the newly incorporated Local Climate Zones in the Weather Research and Forecasting Model version 4.3, a robust experiment is designed and executed to replicate documented rainfall hotspots in Georgia and North Carolina by deploying various land cover/land use schema and urban physical parameterizations.