A paper has been recently published, led by our doctoral student, Do Ngoc Khanh, in Heliyon. The work discusses the impact of urbanization on exposure to extreme warming in megacities. This was achieved using pseudo-global-warming of CMIP5 model outputs and an advanced version of the Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model, capable of considering spatial heterogeneities within cities. The methodology is an expansion of the earlier work of Darmanto et al. (2019), which focused on the megacity, Jakarta. In the current work of Khanh et al. (2023), 43 megacities were investigated and parallelly modeled using the Tsubame supercomputer of Tokyo Institute of Technology.
In each simulation, each city’s spatial distribution of building-representative parameters (i.e. urban parameters), a set of geospatial variables that define the density of buildings, were considered. In addition, anthropogenic heat emissions (AH4GUC) that are varying across each month and hour were also included to have a more holistic representation of each simulation grid point comprised by the city.
An important highlight of the work is the consideration of, not only, the spatial heterogeneity of these urban-representative parameters but also their plausible changes in the future. In the work, detailed urbanization in weather modeling is given increased attention, from the usual focus of considering mainly the background climate change’s influence on a city’s weather.
The work will pave the way for the advancement in the works of the global urban climatology lab, its collaborators, and other researchers who are interested in detailed urban climate modeling. The WRF version used in his work will be shared publicly for other users to utilize the approach.
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