The publication compares the results of 30 urban energy balance models. Due to the specificity of the processes determining the climate of urbanised areas, models of this type are essential to improve the prediction of weather and climate in these areas.
This is crucial for safeguarding human health and strengthening urban resilience. Therefore, it is so important to develop an optimal approach to modelling the city's climate. The importance of the problem was reflected in the number of citations.
Prof. Fortuniak says:
These models are characterised by varying degrees of complexity resulting from different approaches to the problem of substrate inhomogeneity, in particular its geometry, the occurrence of vegetation, materials with different physical properties, etc. They use the values of meteorological elements from the first level of the atmospheric model or measurement data from a fixed height.
The work has been developed by a large international team representing modelers from individual research centres, including the Climate Change Research Center in Australia, the University of Reading in the UK, Seoul National University in South Korea and Princeton University in the USA.
Simulations were carried out independently using standard input data and then compared with measured data. It was shown, among other things, that increasing the complexity of the model does not necessarily lead to improved results.
In cities, increasing the resolution of models results in the fact that at some point structures on the ground (buildings, etc.) become "visible" to the model and a completely different approach is necessary than in the existing numerical weather models. These and other problems mean that it is impossible to create a perfect model, although of course there is room for improvement in the existing models
– states Prof. Fortuniak and he adds:
These models can, in particular, enable better forecasting of phenomena such as the urban heat island, heavy rainfall and flash floods in cities or the spread of pollution, including the one in the event of environmental disasters or terrorist attacks.
In turn, a detailed description of the latest version of the model developed by the scientific team of Prof. Fortuniak can be found in the work: Fortuniak, K., Siedlecki, M., Pawlak, W., & Górowski, J. (2024). Slab (one-tile) surface energy balance scheme: model description and preliminary validation for an urban site and a wetland site. Acta Geographica Lodziensia, 117, 135–145.
