Birmingham Urban Heat Islands during 2003 Heatwave Period  Preliminary WRF/BEP Simulation Xiaoming Cai, Richard Bassett and John E. Thornes School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences University of Birmingham

36h WRF Precip Forecast Analyzed Precip 27 Sept WRF is an advanced mesoscale forecast and assimilation system, and accelerate research advances into operations Collaborative partnership, principally among NCAR, NOAA, DoD, OU/CAPS, FAA, and university community Development conducted by 15 WRF Working Groups Ongoing active testing and rapidly growing community use – Over 1,600 registered community users, annual workshops and tutorials for research community Operational implementation at NCEP and AFWA in 2004 Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)

Three-dimensional, time varying, multi-domain nesting State-of-the-art, transportable, and efficient in a massively parallel computing environment. Design priority for high-resolution applications Advanced data assimilation systems developed in tandem with the model itself. Numerous physics options, tapping into the experience of the full modeling community. Maintained and supported as a community mesoscale model to facilitate broad use in the research community. Research advances will have a direct path to operations. WRF Model Characteristics

 Four nested domains are configured  Surface land data  Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”)  Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories  Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)  Meteorological initial and boundary conditions  US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours WRF-BEP Configuration

Configuration of the nested domains. The figure box is the boundary of Domain 1 and the embedded boxes are the boundaries of Domain 2, 3 & 4. Domain 2 Domain 3 Domain 4 WRF-BEP Domains

WRF-BEP Configuration

Domains 3 and 4 Configuration of the nested domains. The figure box is the boundary of Domain 3 and the embedded box is the boundaries of Domain 4.

Domain 4

 Four nested domains are configured  Surface land data  Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”)  Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories  Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)  Meteorological initial and boundary conditions  US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours WRF-BEP Configuration

Urban type & urban fraction for Domain 4 Urban type for Domain 4: 30=non-urban; 31=low intensity residential; 32=high intensity residential; 33=commercial Urban area fraction for Domain 4: 0-100%

 Four nested domains are configured  Surface land data  Terrain: US SGS (resolution ~ 30”)  Landuse type: US SGS (30”), 24 categories  Urban type: CORINE 2000 & Owen et al. (2006)  Meteorological initial and boundary conditions  US-NCEP Analysis (FNL from GFS) : 1 degree resolution, every 6 hours WRF-BEP Configuration

Domain 2 Animation of simulation results for Domains 2 & 4 Domain 4

Temperature at 2 m above ground (a)2100 (b) 2200 (c) 2300 (d) 2400 Temperature field GMT 4 August 2003 (a)(b) (c)(d)

Temperature field at 0000 GMT 9 August 2003 Temperature at 2 m above ground for Domain 4

Observed temperature at 3 stations 1-10 August 2003

Future work  To fine-tune the model  To validate the model  To simulate various scenarios with different lanuse types  To apply it to 2010 scenarios