Urban weather and climate: contributions and challenges to achieving a climate-neutral Europe

Enormous progress has been made in modelling urban surface to atmosphere exchanges with huge advances in the understanding of the weather and climate of cities. This has been stimulated by greatly increased attention on urban areas as places where people live and sites of some of the most extreme modifications of the environment; by improved instrumentation and measurement campaigns which have enhanced our understanding of key processes and their controls; enhanced conceptual and theoretical frameworks to make sense of what we measure and to underpin numerical models; and computer power which has allowed us to analyse and visualise high resolution data and to model at higher spatial and temporal resolutions. Concurrently as we move from just forecasting to delivering services to a broad array of end-users and  communities (e.g. to support working towards a climate-neutral Europe), the level of detail needed about the urban surface and the urban atmosphere, both spatially (across and between cities) and temporally (from events to long term simulations) also has increased and refocused attention on how best to capture the details of the dynamics of urban environments and the inherent trade-offs between complexity and simplicity of approaches. This talk will consider these developments and challenges and their implications for more sustainable cities and a climate neutral Europe.