ANALYSING URBAN EFFECTS IN BUDAPEST USING THE WRF NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION MODEL

Abstract

Continuously growing cities significantly modify the entire environment through air pollution and modification of land surface, resulting altered energy budget and land-atmosphere exchange processes over built-up areas. These effects mainly appear in cities or metropolitan areas, leading to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon, which occurs due to the temperature difference between the built-up areas and their cooler surroundings. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model coupled to multilayer urban canopy parameterisation is used to investigate this phenomenon for Budapest and its surroundings with actual land surface properties. In this paper the basic ideas of our research and the methodology in brief are presented. The simulation is completed for one week in summer 2015 with initial meteorological fields from Global Forecasting System (GFS) outputs, under atmospheric conditions of weak wind and clear sky for the Pannonian Basin. Then, to improve the WRF model and its settings, the calculated skin temperature is compared to the remotely sensed measurements derived from satellites Aqua and Terra, and the temporal and spatial bias values are estimated.

Keywords

• urban modelling
• Weather Research and Forecasting Model
• land use
• urban heat island
• mesoscale processes