ABSTRACT The ability of a regional climate model (RCM) to represent the summer urban heat island (UHI) effect is investigated for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (EMME). The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used with a bulk urban parameterisation to dynamically downscale the ERA‐Interim re‐analysis data at 16 and 4 km resolution for the period 2000–2002. A regional evaluation against the ERA5‐Land dataset indicates that the model overestimates maximum and underestimates minimum temperatures by 1°C–2°C for air and 5°C for land. However, simulated air and land temperatures compare well with observations for urban and rural locations of the Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) dataset, with the 16 km output showing better skill than the 4 km, possibly due to the lack of model physics optimization in the highest resolution. A detailed analysis of the modelled summer climatology for the city of Cairo reveals a 3°C–5°C air and surface heat island at night‐time and a 5°C–10°C cool island at day‐time for land, corroborated by corresponding urban/rural surface energy fluxes. By averaging similar calculations from 11 cities in the EMME, we derive a larger night‐time UHI for the surface (5°C–6°C) than for the air (3°C–4°C), and for day‐time a very large surface cool island (12.5°C) and a small canopy heat island (1°C–1.5°C). The results indicate the suitability of the simple urban model treatment for multi‐city regional climate change assessments in the EMME.
Constantinidou et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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