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Impact of land use land cover on variation of urban heat island characteristics and surface energy fluxes using WRF and urban canopy model over metropolitan cities of India

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Abstract

The present study focuses on the assessment of urban heat island (UHI) and urban energy fluxes over Indian metropolitan cities. For this purpose, a high-resolution numerical Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and a coupled single-layer urban canopy model (WRF-UCM) has been implemented over Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad to evaluate the performance of these models in capturing the impact of urban areas in simulating the UHI over different land use land cover (LULC) classes. The model initial conditions are obtained from NCEP-FNL reanalysis data. The model simulations reveal that the air temperature at 2 m height (T2) and UHI intensity are overestimated by WRF whereas the WRF-UCM simulations are matching well with ERA5-Land reanalysis data considered as observations. For the WRF-UCM simulation, the statistical errors in T2 and UHI intensity are within the desirable limits and the index of agreement (IoA) is more than 0.8 over the built-up areas (BAs). By comparing with the satellite observations, the relative surface UHI is noticed to be better captured over the BA by WRF-UCM simulation. The sensible heat flux simulated by WRF is highly overestimated whereas WRF-UCM is in good agreement with the satellite observation over the BA. Interestingly, the latent heat flux is reasonably well simulated over all the LULC classes. The results derived from the present study have shown the performance of WRF-UCM in simulating the spatial variation of UHI and fluxes of sensible and latent heat-related varied LULC classifications over metropolitan cities of India.

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Data availability

The FNL data of 0.25° × 0.25° resolution (NCEP GDAS/FNL 0.25 degree Global Tropospheric Analyses and Forecast Grids, ds083.3) are obtained from Computational & Information Systems Lab, Research Data Archive (CISL RDA, (https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds083.3/#!description,10.5065/D65Q4T4Z). The ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset of spatial resolution 0.1° × 0.1° used in the present study is obtained from the archives of European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS) ( 10.24381/cds.e2161bac,https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-land?tab=form). The LST, SHF and LHF used for comparison purposes are retrieved from Landsat images obtained from the USGS EarthExplorer user interface (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/). The ground observations of the local weather stations present at the airports of the study area are obtained from the Weather Underground atmospheric soundings (https://www.wunderground.com/).

Code availability

Software: MATLAB R2016a, ArcGIS 10.3, ERDAS Imagine. Computational model: WRF 3.9.1

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Acknowledgements

The first author of the manuscript would gratefully acknowledge the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, for providing the fellowship and necessary facilities to conduct the PhD work. The authors are thankful to the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) for availing the FNL data and are also thankful to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for freely availing the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset. The authors acknowledge the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center data for freely providing the Landsat imageries used in the study. The authors are also thankful to the Weather Underground for freely availing the atmospheric soundings.

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  1. Centre for Ocean, River, Atmosphere and Land Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, 721, 302, Kharagpur, India

    Sabiha Sultana & A. N. V. Satyanarayana

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  1. Sabiha Sultana
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  2. A. N. V. Satyanarayana
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Contributions

SS and ANVS designed and framed the study. SS analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. ANVS provided the intellectual advice and work directions along with the review and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to A. N. V. Satyanarayana.

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Sultana, S., Satyanarayana, A.N.V. Impact of land use land cover on variation of urban heat island characteristics and surface energy fluxes using WRF and urban canopy model over metropolitan cities of India. Theor Appl Climatol 152, 97–121 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04362-y

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