ILS+Urban: an offline land-surface process model for global urban climate and building energy simulations

We have developed ILS+Urban: a coupled model of an offline land-surface model (ILS) and an urban canopy and building energy model (SLUCM+BEM) for global urban climate and energy research. The ILS is an offline land-surface model developed by Nitta et al. (2020) that includes MATSIRO (Takata et al. 2003), a land-surface model for the global climate model MIROC5. The SLUCM+BEM is a new parametrisation for urban climate and building energy simulations developed by the authors (Takane et al. 2024), which can simply simulate anthropogenic heat from buildings (Q_FB) and electricity consumption (EC) from human activities. The model could reproduce urban air temperature and EC well in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. We have implemented the SLUCM+BEM in the ILS, allowing us to simulate global urban climate and building energy with relatively low computational resources in offline mode. A test simulation of ILS+Urban shows that Q_FB and EC tend to be quantitatively high throughout the year in the Middle East. In the near future, we will implement a global urban database (e.g. global LCZ, anthropogenic heat emissions and morphology, air-conditioning adoption rate) and new technology parameterisations (e.g. EV, PV and heat pump water heaters) for global urban climate and building energy projections and countermeasures for urban heat and energy savings & generation. In addition, the ILS+Urban will be coupled with global climate models (e.g. MIROC and NICAM).

References:
Nitta et al. (2020) PEPS, 7, 68.
Takane et al. (2024) ESS Open Archive (under review), https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.170960070.07397688/v1
Takata et al. (2003) GPC, 38, 209–222.