Chicago’s Heat Island and Climate Change: Bridging the Scales via Dynamical Downscaling

AbstractThe interaction of global climate change and urban heat islands (UHI) is expected to have far-reaching impacts on the sustainability of the world’s rapidly growing urban population centers. Given that a wide range of spatiotemporal scales contributed by meteorological forcing and complex surface heterogeneity complicates UHI, a multimodel nested approach is used in this paper to study climate-change impacts on the Chicago, Illinois, UHI, covering a range of relevant scales. One-way dynamical downscaling is used with a model chain consisting of global climate (Community Atmosphere Model), regional climate (Weather Research and Forecasting Model), and microscale (“ENVI-met”) models. Nested mesoscale and microscale models are evaluated against the present-day observations (including a dedicated urban miniature field study), and the results favorably demonstrate the fidelity of the downscaling techniques that were used. A simple building-energy model is developed and used in conjunction with microscal...

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