Impacts of the 4.5 and 8.5 RCP global climate scenarios on urban meteorology and air quality: application to Madrid, Antwerp, Milan, Helsinki and London

• Roberto San José ^[1] ; Juan L. Pérez ^[1] ; Rosa M. González ^[2] ; Julia Pecci ^[3] ; Antonio Garzón ^[3] ; Marino Palacios ^[3]
  1. [1] Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

     Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

     Madrid, España

     
  2. [2] Universidad Complutense de Madrid

     Universidad Complutense de Madrid

     Madrid, España

     
  3. [3] Indra S.A., Madrid, Spain

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• Localización: Journal of computational and applied mathematics, ISSN 0377-0427, Vol. 293, Nº 1 (February 2016), 2016, págs. 192-207
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cam.2015.04.024
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• Resumen

  • Climate change is expected to influence urban living conditions and challenge the ability of cities to adapt and mitigate climate change. This paper describes a new modelling system for climate change impact assessments on urban climate and air quality with feasible computational costs (the expected CPU time is too large for actual supercomputer platforms). The system takes the outputs from a global climate model, which are injected into a dynamical regional climate model (WRF-Chem) with the nested capability activated, with 25 km spatial resolution. In addition, the system uses a diagnostic meteorological model (CALMET) to produce urban detailed information (with 200 m spatial resolution) using this downscaling procedure. At the city level, a simplified chemical-transport model (based on CMAQ and using linear chemistry) is used to map the spatial distribution of the pollutants. The system is applied to five European cities: Madrid, Antwerp, Milan, Helsinki and London (Kensington–Chelsea area). The modelling system was used to simulate the climate and air quality for present year (2011) and future years (2030, 2050 and 2100) using 2011 emissions as control run, because we want to investigate the effects on the global climate on the actual (2011) cities. Effects on temperature, precipitation, and ozone are also considered. We compare the climate and air concentrations in future years 2030, 2050 and 2100 with the control year (2011). Comparison of simulations for present situation (using NNRP reanalysis 2011 data sets) shows acceptable agreement with measurements which give us strong confidence on the results for the RCP IPCC climate future simulations for 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios.