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• Urban canopy model incorporating in-canyon trees is coupled with the WRF model. • The coupled model is evaluated and shows reasonable performance. • Trees in narrower and deeper canyons show stronger cooling. • Cooling effects of trees diminish as soil moisture decreases. • However, cooling effects persist in very dry conditions due to tree shading. Urban trees play a crucial role in mitigating heat stress. Accurately representing the physical processes associated with trees in mesoscale models is essential for reliable simulations of urban environments across city to regional scales. We implement an urban canopy model incorporating trees into the Weather Research and Forecasting model to develop a fully coupled modeling system. The model is evaluated against pedestrian-level temperature, flux tower, and soil moisture measurements from the Seoul metropolitan area. Two heatwave episodes are simulated, and the model demonstrates reasonable performance in reproducing intra-city temperature differences, canyon air temperatures, and sensible and latent heat fluxes. A stronger cooling effect of trees is observed in commercial/industrial areas, with a daily mean temperature reduction of 1.1 °C compared to 0.64 °C in residential areas. The cooling effect is pronounced at night in narrower and deeper canyons, attributed to the greater longwave cooling of leaves. As soil moisture decreases, the cooling effects of trees diminish; however, significant cooling persists under very dry conditions due to tree shading, which is more prominent in commercial/industrial areas than in residential areas. Our findings indicate that comprehensive studies encompassing various tree and urban configurations are necessary to optimize the role of trees in sustainable cities.
Ryu et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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