High-quality climate information tailored to cities’ needs assists decision makers to prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts, as well as to support the transition toward climate resilient cities. During the last decades, two main modelling approaches emerged to understand and analyse the urban climate and to generate information. Firstly, meso- and microscale urban climate models commonly resolve the street to city scale climate (1m to 1km) through simulating short “weather” type episodes, possibly under climate change conditions. Secondly, regional climate models (RCMs) are currently approaching kilometer scale resolutions (1-4 km), becoming increasingly relevant to understand the interactions of cities with the regional climate on timescales from decades up to a century. Therefore, the WCRP CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study “URBan environments and Regional Climate Change (FPS URB-RCC)” brings together the urban climate modelling community and the RCM community and focuses on understanding the interactions between urban areas and regional climate change, with the help of coordinated experiments with an RCM ensemble having refined urban representations. This paper presents the FPS URB-RCC, its main aims, as well as the initial steps taken. The FPS URB-RCC advances urban climate projections and information to support evidence-based climate action towards climate resilient cities.
Langendijk, Gaby S. and Halenka, Tomas and Hoffmann, Peter and Adinolfi, Marianna and Aldama Campino, Aitor and Asselin, Olivier and Bastin, Sophie and Bechtel, Benjamin and Belda, Michal and Bushenkova, Angelina and Campanale, Angelo and Chun, Kwok Pan and Constantinidou, Katiana and Coppola, Erika and Demuzere, Matthias and Doan, Quang-Van and Evans, Jason P. and Feldmann, Hendrik and Fernandez, Jesus and Fita, Lluís and Hadjinicolaou, Panos and Hamdi, Rafiq and Hundhausen, Marie and Grawe, David and Johannsen, Frederico and Milovac, Josipa and Katragkou, Eleni and El Islam Kerroumi, Nour and Kotlarski, Sven and Le Roy, Benjamin Guillaume and Lemonsu, Aude and Lennard, Christopher and Lipson, Mathew and Mandal, Shailendra and Muñoz Pabón, Luís E. and Pavlidis, Vassileios and Pietikäinen, Joni-Pekka and Raffa, Mario and Raluy-López, Eloisa and Rechid, Diana and Ito, Rui and Schulz, Jan-Peter and Soares, Pedro M. M. and Takane, Yuya and Teichmann, Claas and Thatcher, Marcus and Top, Sara and Van Schaeybroeck, Bert and Wang, Fuxing and Yuan, Jiacan, Towards Better Understanding the Urban Environment and its Interactions with Regional Climate Change -The Wcrp Cordex Flagship Pilot Study Urb-Rcc. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4846089 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4846089
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