Incoming data quality control in high-resolution urban climate simulations: a Hong Kong–Shenzhen area urban climate simulation as a case study using the WRF/Noah LSM/SLUCM model (Version 3.7.1)

Abstract

The growth of computational power unleashed the potential of high-resolution urban climate simulations using limited-area models in recent years. This trend empowered us to deepen our understanding of urban-scale climatology with much finer spatial–temporal details. However, these high-resolution models would also be particularly sensitive to model uncertainties, especially in urbanizing cities where natural surface texture is changed artificially into impervious surfaces with extreme rapidity. These artificial changes always lead to dramatic changes in the land surface process. While models capturing detailed meteorological processes are being refined continuously, the input data quality has been the primary source of biases in modeling results but has received inadequate attention. To address this issue, we first examine the quality of the incoming static data in two cities in China, i.e., Shenzhen and Hong Kong SAR, provided by the WRF ARW model, a widely applied state-of-the-art mesoscale numerical weather simulation model. Shenzhen has gone through an unprecedented urbanization process in the past 30 years, and Hong Kong SAR is another well-urbanized city. A significant proportion of the incoming data is outdated, highlighting the necessity of conducting incoming data quality control in the region of Shenzhen and Hong Kong SAR. Therefore, we proposed a sophisticated methodology to develop a high-resolution land surface dataset in this region. We conducted urban climate simulations in this region using both the developed land surface dataset and the original dataset utilizing the WRF ARW model coupled with Noah LSM/SLUCM and evaluated the performance of modeling results. The performance of modeling results using the developed high-resolution urban land surface datasets is significantly improved compared to modeling results using the original land surface dataset in this region. This result demonstrates the necessity and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Our results provide evidence of the effects of incoming land surface data quality on the accuracy of high-resolution urban climate simulations and emphasize the importance of the incoming data quality control.