Analytical simulation and inversion of dynamic urban land surface effects

Abstract:

Long-term thermal changes at the land surface can be backtracked from borehole temperature profiles. The main focus so far has been on past climate changes, assuming perfect coupling of surface air and ground temperature. In many urbanized areas, however, temperature profiles are heavily perturbed. We find a characteristic bending of urban profiles towards shallow depth, which indicates strong heating from the ground surface during recent decades. This phenomenon is generally described as subsurface urban heat island (UHI) effect, which exists beneath many cities worldwide. Major drivers are land use changes and urban structures that act as long-term heat sources that artificially load the top 100 m of the ground.

While variability in land use and coverage are critical factors for reliable borehole climatology, temperature profiles can also be inverted to trace back the combined effect of past urbanization and climate. We present an analytical framework based on the superposition of specific Green’s functions for simulating transient land use changes and their effects on borehole temperature profiles. By inversion in a Bayesian framework, flexible calibration of unknown spatially distributed parameter values and their correlation is feasible. The procedure is applied to four temperature logs which are around 200-400 m deep from the city and suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland. These were recorded recently by a temperature sensor and data logger introduced in closed borehole heat exchangers before the start of geothermal operation. At the sites, long-term land use changes are well documented for more than the last century. This facilitated focusing on a few unknown parameters, and we selected the contribution by asphalt and by basements of buildings. It is revealed that for three of the four sites, these two factors dominate the subsurface UHI evolution. At one site, additional factors such as buried district heating networks may play a role. It is demonstrated that site-specific conditions at the ground surface are mirrored in the form of the temperature profiles. Site-specific land use changes appear to be more crucial in general for the near surface temperature evolution than long-term climatic changes.