The impact of urban growth on mesoscale meteorological features and characteristics over the urban area of paris

Changes in land use associated with urban growth represent one of the most important anthropogenic influence on climate. The rapid rate of urbanization alters the thermal and dynamical environment, affects the local atmospheric boundary layer structure and the urban microclimate and results in complex meteorological fields especially in the roughness sublayer. Aiming to address these phenomena from the modelling perspective, a new scheme for a more accurate representation of the dynamical and thermodynamical effects of urban and rural areas is introduced in a mesoscale meteorological model. The new urbanization scheme incorporates parameterisations of the area-averaged effects of drag and turbulence production as well as an improved representation of the surface heat and moisture fluxes. In addition, an advanced data assimilation module is implemented for enabling the self-consistent estimation of anthropogenic heat fluxes on the basis of representative satellite data, as well as the introduction of the resulting forcing in the surface energy budget. The Paris metropolitan area, one of the largest cities in the world, densely populated with an extremely high density of activities and industry, was selected as case study for testing and evaluating this new urbanization scheme.