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Presentation: Professor Francisco Salamanca Palou at the MPAS/WRF Workshop

Francisco Salamanca Palou, Assistant Research Professor, School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, June 10, 2019, presented “Summer and Wintertime Variations of the Surface and Near-surface UHI in a Semiarid Environment” to a joint MPAS/WRF workshop. Prepared by both Salamanca & colleague Alex Mahalov, Dean’s Distinguished Professor from the same school, Salamanca explained the motivation for this work stems from recent work done to augment the WRF-urban modeling system. Realizing that there was still additional work to complete, Salamanca and Mahalov set out to “examine summer- and wintertime variations of the surface and near-surface UHI for a semiarid urban environment using MODIS and near-surface meteorological observations.” Also, “to evaluate the WRF-urban modeling system’s (coupled to Noah-MP LSM) ability to reproduce the diurnal cycle of near-surface meteorology and LST during Salamanca News Julyboth summer and wintertime weather conditions.”

 

Sharing detailed modeling experiments, the author’s conclusions were:

  1. The Surface UHI is found to be higher at night and during the warm season.
  2. The morning Surface UHI is low and frequently exhibits an Urban Cool Island that increases during the summertime period.
  3. The Near-surface UHI is higher at night and during summertime.
  4. The morning Near-surface UHI is low but rarely exhibits an Urban Cool Island.
  5. WRF (coupled to Noah-MP) model tends to slightly underestimate surface skin temperature during daytime but overestimates nighttime values during wintertime.
  6. WRF (coupled to Noah-MP) model tends to accurately reproduce the diurnal cycle of near-surface air temperature and wind speed during summertime, but overestimate near-surface nighttime air temperature during wintertime.

The entire presentation is available at: http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/workshops/WS2019/workshop19agenda.php