APPLICATION OF MULTI-LAYER PARAMETERIZATION OF URBAN LANDSCAPES IN WRF-ARW REGIONAL MODEL TO CREATE A DATABASE ON THE CLIMATE OF A MEGACITY AND ITS SUBURBS: FIRST RESULTS FOR THE MOSCOW REGION

Abstract

The current development level of urban meteorology as a synthetic science that includes elements of climatology,ecology, urban studies, and computational mathematics requires the creation of adequate databases of meteorological parameters:only in this way can they be properly used for solving problems of both applied sciences and fundamental research.Therefore, obtaining information on the intra-urban distribution of air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed mustmeet the most stringent quality criteria. The most modern method for obtaining high-resolution databases is hydrodynamic modeling with the use of regional weather and climate forecast models (WRF, COSMO_RU, ENVIRO-HIRLAM, etc.).However, for horizontal resolution of about a kilometer it is already necessary to use so-called multilevel parameterizationsof the urban surface layer of the atmosphere, which take into account the vertical structure within the urban area. For this purpose, it seems promising to adapt the most modern physically based parameterizations of the lower atmosphere, such as Building EnergyParameterization (BEP) and Building Energy Model (BEM), for the popular, freely distributed regional model WRF-ARW, whichhas been used in our study for the Moscow region (Moscow + Moscow Oblast). The article reviews the advantages of this approachand the results of the first computational experiments. We provide estimates of the accuracy of temperature and relative humiditysimulation for a full-fledged experiment on dynamic downscaling of ERA5 reanalysis data within the Moscow region for 2010 (as aperiod with notable seasonal temperature contrasts, including the infamous extreme heat wave over European Russia).