ABSTRACT:The heterogeneous nature of urban environments means that atmospheric research ideally requires a dense network of sensors to adequately resolve the local climate. With recent advances in sensor technology, a number of urban meteorological networks now exist with a range of research or operational objectives. This article reviews and assesses the current status of urban meteorological networks, by examining the fundamental scientific and logistical issues related to these networks. The article concludes by making recommendations for future deployments based on the challenges encountered by existing networks, including the need for better reporting and documentation of network characteristics, standardized approaches and guidelines, along with the need to overcome financial barriers via collaborative relationships in order to establish the long-term urban networks essential for advancing urban climate research.

BackgroundThe Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect describes the phenomenon whereby cities are generally warmer than surrounding rural areas. Traditionally, temperature monitoring sites are placed outside of city centres, which means that point measurements do not always reflect the true air temperature of urban centres, and estimates of health impacts based on such data may under-estimate the impact of heat on public health. Climate change is likely to exacerbate heatwaves in future, but because climate projections do not usually include the UHI, health impacts may be further underestimated. These factors motivate a two-dimensional analysis of population weighted temperature across an urban area, for heat related health impact assessments, since populations are typically densest in urban centres, where ambient temperatures are highest and the UHI is most pronounced. We investigate the sensitivity of health impact estimates to the use of population weighting and the inclusion of urban temperatures in exposure data.MethodsWe quantify the attribution of the UHI to heat related mortality in the West Midlands during the heatwave of August 2003 by comparing health impacts based on two modelled temperature simulations. The first simulation is based on detailed urban land use information and captures the extent of the UHI, whereas in the second simulation, urban land surfaces have been replaced by rural types.Results and conclusionsThe results suggest that the UHI contributed around 50 % of the total heat-related mortality during the 2003 heatwave in the West Midlands. We also find that taking a geographical, rather than population-weighted, mean of temperature across the regions under-estimates the population exposure to temperatures by around 1 °C, roughly equivalent to a 20 % underestimation in mortality. We compare the mortality contribution of the UHI to impacts expected from a range of projected temperatures based on the UKCP09 Climate Projections. For a medium emissions scenario, a typical heatwave in 2080 could be responsible for an increase in mortality of around 3 times the rate in 2003 (278 vs. 90 deaths) when including changes in population, population weighting and the UHI effect in the West Midlands, and assuming no change in population adaptation to heat in future.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0100-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Birmingham is the second most populous city in the United Kingdom and observations indicate that it has a pronounced urban heat island (UHI), i.e. higher ambient temperatures in the city centre compared with surrounding suburban and rural areas, particularly at night. The effects of UHIs are often amplified during anticyclonic summer weather conditions, which can cause or exacerbate heatwaves. Enhanced temperatures in highly populated regions can mean that significant numbers of people are at risk from heat-related illness during hot weather. Climate change projections often do not include the effects of the UHI, which can mean that assessments of heat-related health effects using these projections underestimate the actual magnitude of future health impacts. We present numerical simulations of the UHI in Birmingham and the West Midlands Metropolitan region during the heatwave of August 2003 using the high-resolution, regional meteorological Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, with an urban canopy scheme. We evaluated the model using local air-temperature observations, and found good model performance in capturing the temporal and spatial signature of the UHI. We performed a sensitivity test, replacing urban land categories with rural ones, and found that the difference in temperature between the two model runs throughout the heatwave period (2-11 August 2003) was around 3• C on average, and reached a maximum of 7• C. Finally, we present a novel generic methodology to enable the examination of the extent of horizontal advection of warm air downwind of the conurbation area. We found that during the heatwave, temperatures downwind of Birmingham were up to 2.5• C warmer than those upwind. This methodology has the potential for improvements to, or parametrizations for, diagnostic models that do not explicitly include dynamics and where local conditions are driven largely by land-surface type.

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SUMMARYThe turbulent flow inside an idealized urban street canyon with an aspect ratio of one is studied by means of large-eddy simulation. The Regional Atmospheric Modelling System is configured to simulate the turbulent flow in a neutrally stratified atmosphere with the initial wind perpendicular to the street canyon axis. The mean velocity components, resolved-scale turbulent kinetic energy (RS-TKE), the skewness and kurtosis of the resolved-scale velocity components (u along the canyon and w vertically) are compared with wind-tunnel measurements. The comparison indicates that a reasonable agreement is achieved. The simulation slightly underestimates the intensity of the primary eddy. It is found that distribution of the RS-TKE is very asymmetric: high in the vicinity of the downstream wall, and uniformly low in the vicinity of the upstream wall. The analyses of skewness and kurtosis indicate that there is a layer just below the rooftop in the canyon where ejection events dominate. Quadrant analysis of resolved-scale velocity fluctuations, u and w , under the rooftop at the centre of the canyon reveals that the exchange of momentum across the canyon top is contributed unevenly by different events. Weak ejection events dominate the frequency of occurrences, but fewer strong sweep events contribute the majority of the total momentum transfer. The features of momentum transfer are further investigated by analysing the spatial-temporal variations of u , w , and u w at the roof level. It is found that the variation of these variables is highly intermittent and is associated with multi-scale turbulent events. The period of eddies containing high RS-TKE is attributed to the Kelvin-Helmhotz instabilities. These results improve our understanding of the turbulent structure in street canyon flow.