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Urban-climate interactions during summer over eastern North America

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Abstract

The urban heat island is a representative urban climate characteristic, which can affect heat-stress conditions and extreme precipitation that are closely connected with human life. Better understanding of urban-climate interactions, therefore, is crucial to ultimately support better planning and adaptation in various application fields. This study assesses urban-climate interactions during summer for eastern North America using regional climate model simulations at 0.22° resolution. Two regional climate model experiments, with and without realistic representation of urban regions, are performed for the 1981–2010 period. Comparison of the two experiments shows higher mean temperatures and reduced mean precipitation in the simulation with realistic urban representation, which can be attributed primarily to reduced albedo and soil moisture for the urban regions in this simulation. Furthermore, the mean temperature and precipitation in the simulation with improved urban representation is also closer to that observed. Analysis of short-duration precipitation extremes for climatologically different sub-regions, however, suggests that, for higher temperatures, the magnitudes of precipitation extremes are generally higher in the simulation with realistic urban representation, particularly for coastal urban regions, and are collocated with higher values of convective available potential energy and cloud fraction. Enhanced sea and lake breezes associated with lower sea level pressure found around these regions, contribute additional water vapor and further enhance dynamic convective development, leading to higher precipitation intensities. Analysis of temperature extremes clearly demonstrates that urban regions experience aggravated heat-stress conditions due to relatively higher temperatures despite reduced relative humidity. Double the number of extreme heat spells lasting six or more days are noted for the coastal urban regions in the study domain. This study, in addition to demonstrating the differences in urban-climate interactions for climatologically different regions, also demonstrates the need for better representation of urban regions in climate models to generate realistic climate information.

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Acknowledgements

The first author would like to thank Vincent Poitras and Bernardo Teufel with the processing of the urban geophysical fields. The GEM simulations considered in this study were performed on the supercomputer managed by Compute Canada and Calcul Québec. Model output data and analysis data for this study are available for request to the corresponding author (seokgeunoh@snu.ac.kr).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Seok-Geun Oh & Laxmi Sushama

  2. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

    Seok-Geun Oh

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  1. Seok-Geun Oh
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  2. Laxmi Sushama
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Correspondence to Seok-Geun Oh.

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Oh, SG., Sushama, L. Urban-climate interactions during summer over eastern North America. Clim Dyn 57, 3015–3028 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05852-3

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