Urban heat island intensity maps and local weather types description for a 45 French urban agglomerations dataset obtained from atmopsheric numerical simulations

Abstract

This article presents a dataset of spatial nocturnal Urban Heat Island (UHI) intensities for 45 French urban agglomerations, at a horizontal resolution of 250 m. The urban influence on air temperature at 2 m above ground level was obtained by coupling the mesoscale atmospheric model Meso-NH with the land surface model SURFEX-TEB. For each agglomeration, two specific local weather situations that favour the development of a strong UHI in summer are simulated and described in a specfic sheet. Simulation outputs have been postprocessed to 1) identify the time of day when the UHI is the most developed, 2) to merge information from both meteorological situations in order to obtain one synthetic UHI map and 3) a geographical analysis that allows to classify each city among five spatial UHI classes (Concentrated Very High Intensity; Concentrated High Intensity; Limited Intensity; Dispersed High Intensity; and Dispersed Cool Zones). This dataset can therefore be used for several purposes, from the analysis at the scale of a city to the comparison of the urban agglomerations among them.

Keywords

• Urban microclimate
• Air temperature
• Town energy balance
• SURFEX
• Meso-NH
• Urban unit