Urban metabolism and climate change: A planning support system

Patterns of urban development influence flows of material and energy within urban settlements and exchanges with its surrounding. In recent years the quantitative estimation of the components of the so-called urban metabolism has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers from different fields. To contribute to this effort we developed a modelling framework for estimating the carbon exchanges together with sensible and latent heat fluxes and air temperature in relation to alternative land-use scenarios. The framework bundles three components: (i) a Cellular Automata model for the simulation of the urban land-use dynamics; (ii) a transportation model for estimating the variation of the transportation network load and (iii) the Advanced Canopy-Atmosphere-Soil Algorithm (ACASA) model tightly coupled with the mesoscale weather forecasting model WRF. We present and discuss the results of an example application on the City of Florence.

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