Harro Joseph Jongen

and 20 more

Urban Land Surface Models (ULSMs) simulate energy and water exchanges between the urban surface and atmosphere. When part of numerical weather prediction, ULSMs provide a lower boundary for the atmosphere and improve the applicability of model results in the urban environment compared with non-urban land surface models. However, earlier systematic ULSM comparison projects assessed the energy balance but ignored the water balance which is coupled to the energy balance. Here, we analyze the water balance representation in 19 ULSMs participating in the Urban-PLUMBER project using results for 20 sites spread across a range of climates and urban form characteristics. As observations for most water fluxes are unavailable, we examine the water balance closure, flux timing, and magnitude with a score derived from seven indicators. We find that the water budget is only closed in 57% of the model-site combinations assuming closure when annual total incoming fluxes (precipitation and irrigation) fluxes are within 3% of the outgoing (all other) fluxes. Results show the timing is better captured than magnitude. No ULSM has passed all good water balance indicators for any site. Our results indicate models could be improved by explicitly verifying water balance closure and revising runoff parameterizations. By expanding ULSM evaluation to the water balance and related to latent heat flux performance, we demonstrate the benefits of evaluating processes with direct feedback mechanisms to the processes of interest.

Peiyuan Li

and 3 more

Chenghao Wang

and 2 more

Our world has been continuously urbanized and is currently accommodating more than half of the human population in cities. Despite that cities cover only less than 3% of the Earth’s land surface area, they emerged as focal points of human activities, and confront numerous environmental challenges as a result of changes in landscapes, hydroclimate, ecosystems, and biodiversity. In particular, the built environment usually experiences exacerbated heat stress induced by global climate and landscape changes, commonly known as the urban heat island effect. Urban irrigation, as a climate adaptation and mitigation strategy, is effective in cooling the built environment, but exhibits large uncertainties in the trade-off between water use and heat mitigation capacity. Here we show the efficiency of cooling effect induced by irrigation of urban vegetation, represented by a novel metric, viz. urban water capacity, analogous to the heat capacity, across the contiguous United States (CONUS) during summertime via numerical simulations. The urban water capacity is calculated as the average irrigation depth per degree of urban temperature reduction; the values are 4.52 ± 0.77 mm day–1 °C–1 and 7.27 ± 1.27 mm day–1 °C–1 (mean ± standard deviation) for surface and near-surface air cooling, respectively, over the CONUS. The robustness of urban water capacity is further exemplified in an extreme heat wave event, during which the warming anomaly is partially offset by the additional cooling from urban irrigation. Estimates of water capacity provide a quantitative metric for evaluating the efficacy of irrigation in urban planning under current heat stress and future warming.