Influence of urban land cover data uncertainties on the numerical simulations of urbanization effects in the 2013 high-temperature episode in Eastern China

Abstract

Updating the urban land cover information has been proved a necessary method for the numerical studies of urban climate and urban atmospheric environment in China, a fast urbanizing country. However, there are uncertainties in the urban land use/cover (ULUC) information in different datasets due to the uncertainties in raw data sources and produce methods. In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting model is used to simulate the summer climate over the Yangtze River Delta in July and August 2013, when a heatwave episode occurred. Five numerical experiments are designed; one is the baseline experiment (non-urban land cover (NOURB)) in which all urban land covers are removed, and different urban land use/cover (ULUC) experiments from four different global land cover datasets are used in other four experiments. The differences between the ULUC experiments and the NOURB experiment are used to observe the urbanization effects. The results show a remarkable urbanization effect in all the ULUC experiments, and the urbanization influences are most different over the union-urban area, which defined as the area marked as urban area by at least one land cover dataset, because the uncertainties in urban land cover information are greatest in this area. All the ULUC experiments show the regional influence of urbanization as well, which means urbanization effects are not limited in cities. The Climate Change Initiative (CCI) experiment using the European Space Agency CCI 2013 dataset showed the greatest urbanization influence and the highest effect index in all analyzed variables, because of the largest urban land cover area in the analysis domain. The urban land cover area in the Global Land Cover experiment is the smallest among the ULUC experiments, but it distributes in a more concentrated way than in other experiments; it indicates that both city size and city shape affect the regional influence.

Different changes in dry and humid heat waves over China

“…This index has been recommended by many official administrations such as the NOAA National Weather Service (https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/heat_index.shtml). It has also been widely used in many climate studies in China (Luo and Lau, 2018;Wang et al, 2019aWang et al, , 2019bZhang et al, 2019).…”

Analysis of the Daytime Urban Heat Island Mechanism in East China

“…Over the past few decades, the rapid development of geographic information technology based on satellite remote sensing has formed multiple sets of high‐resolution global land‐use data sets, allowing extensive research on land use and land cover, including urbanization, and its influence on the weather and climate (Di Vittorio et al., 2018; Miao et al., 2009; Oleson et al., 2004). Previous studies showed that the land‐atmosphere interaction is sensitive to land‐use information (Cheng et al., 2013; Monaghan et al., 2014; Schultz et al., 2016; N. Zhang et al., 2019), which suggests that it is crucial to pay more attention to the accurate characterization of land use and land cover, such as urban lands and vegetation‐covered lands, for numerical simulations. However, numerous studies have emphasized that there are currently noteworthy disagreements among various land‐use data sets.…”

The sensitivity of simulated surface-level pollution concentrations to WRF-ARW-model PBL parameterisation schemes over the Highveld of South Africa

“…(Broxton et al, 2014). This is the default dataset for the version of the WRF-ARW model used here (Zhang et al, 2019).…”