B34C-05
Impacts and feedbacks of urbanization on regional hydroclimate: a case study with a high-resolution GFDL AGCM
Wednesday, 16 December 2015: 17:10
2004 (Moscone West)
Sergey Malyshev1, Dan Li1, Elena Shevliakova2, Lucas Harris3 and Shian-Jiann Lin4, (1)Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States, (2)GFDL-Princeton University Cooperative Institute for Climate Science, Princeton, NJ, United States, (3)Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, United States, (4)NOAA Camp Springs, Camp Springs, MD, United States
Abstract:
Land-use/land-cover changes at local, regional and global scales have been shown to play an important role in local and regional climate, including hydrological and biogeochemical cycles. Urbanization is an example of extreme land-use/land-cover change through which natural surfaces are turned into man-made surfaces with drastically different characteristics. While effects such as urban heat islands have been studied for decades, regional hydroclimate impacts and feedbacks at annual to decadal time scales remain elusive. To answer this question, an urban canopy model is integrated into the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) global climate and earth system models. In this study, the newly developed urban canopy model is coupled to a high-resolution, stretch-grid Atmospheric General Circulation model (AGCM) to investigating the hydroclimatic impacts of urbanization over the Continental United States (CONUS) with a resolution of ~8 km. These high-resolution, long-term climate simulations are used to advance our current understanding of the role of urbanization in altering regional hydroclimate.
