Numerical study of the urban geometrical representation impact in a surface energy budget model

The aim of this work is to investigate how both the orientation of the urban canyon and the modeling of the edge effects (i.e. urban canyons of finite length) are important in the numerical simulation of the surface energy budget in urban areas. Starting from the town energy balance scheme, two models of increasing complexity of the canyon geometry are developed. A sensitivity analysis of the role played by the chosen hypothesis and parameterizations is performed by coupling the canyon schemes with the numerical weather prediction model RAMS. The results suggest that a detailed description of the urban geometry could produce non-negligible differences of the energy balances and of the temperature fields with respect to what occurs using simpler schematizations, in particular during the summer.