Climate Change Scenarios and Prediction Localization for City of Prague

Cities play a fundamental role in climate at local to regional scales through modification of heat and moisture fluxes, as well as affecting local atmospheric chemistry and composition, alongside air-pollution dispersion. Vice versa, regional climate change impacts urban areas and is expected to increasingly affect cities and their citizens in the upcoming decades. To assess the impact of cities and urban structures on weather, climate, and air quality, a modeling approach is commonly used and the inclusion of urban parameterization in land-surface interactions is of primary importance to capture the urban effects properly. This is especially important when going to higher resolution, which is a common trend in the operational weather forecast, air-quality prediction as well as regional climate modeling. As the most of population is living in the cities and the share is increasing, we need a proper description of urban processes to assess impacts within the cities and the effectiveness of adaptation and mitigation options applied in cities in connection with climate change as well as the urban heat island itself. This is critical in connection to extreme events, for instance, heat waves with extremely high temperatures exacerbated by the urban heat island effect, in particular during night-time, with significant consequences for human health. In the City of Prague, this can achieve about 4-5°C.

This is studied in the local project PERUN in very high resolution (convection-permitting) to localize climate change scenarios for the City of Prague. The potential of such simulations for urban heat island adaptation and/or mitigation options assessment and planning is studied within the project IMPETUS4CHANGE, where the City of Prague is one of the so-called Demonstrator City, where proof of concept will be evaluated. Connection to the air quality interaction is considered as well.