Hyper-local extreme temperature and wind modeling in the Basque Country

The sustainability of economic development and living conditions depends to a large extent on our ability to manage the risks associated with extreme events. In that sense, many practical problems require knowledge of the behaviour of extreme meteo-climatic variables at a high level of spatial and temporal detail. This is particularly true around highly populated areas where most part of the socio-economic activity takes place. Those metropolitan areas seem to be more vulnerable to extreme meteo-climatic conditions in the coming decades.

In this paper, we present some results of the implementation of operational high-resolution tools (down to 100m) for temperature and wind analysis at local level. Here we focus on different systems we have developed for its applications at local level in the Basque Country based on WRF and CALMET but we also include a brief descriptive analysis of some others available tools for thermal and wind analysis at high spatial resolution.

In order to test their operational capabilities, the behaviour of the different systems is analysed in diverse experiments corresponding to high impact weather scenarios, affecting the three largest metropolitan areas of the Basque Country, i.e. the metropolitan areas of Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastian and Vitoria-Gasteiz, where more than half of the Basque population lives.  

The aim of this study is to evaluate and provide plausible tools and methodologies for very high resolution meteo-climatic analysis in the Basque Country area, focusing on wind and temperature extremes. With the final objective of identifying the benefit of hyperlocal modelling, finding under which conditions and spatio-temporal resolutions these highly computation demanding tools for wind and thermal characterisation are fully useful and provide sufficient added value. It is important to note that some results and main conclusions are of a general nature and could be extrapolated to other areas.