Current Research: Urban land cover representation in the Community Climate System Model (CCSM)

I am currently collaborating with NCAR scientists to develop an urban model for inclusion in the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) (Figure 1). We have completed the model and have tested in for specific scenarios in Mexico City and Vancouver. We used NCEP weather forcing to simulate heat island activity across the US. Results show that heat island intensity is well simulated but varies significantly depending on weather conditions and surrounding land cover types (figure 2). For future work on this project I am creating transient datasets to simulate land cover and urban extent in the past, present and future.

Figure 1: schematic representation of the urban canyon model for CCSM

Figure 2: Simulated maximum heat island temperatures for different canyon ht-width ratios for all grid cells over the US.