ICUC12-1003, updated on 21 May 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-1003
12th International Conference on Urban Climate
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Urban influence on precipitation: insights from the FPS-URB-RCC regional climate simulations
Andrés Simón-Moral1,2, Josipa Milovac1, Jesus Fernández1, Sophie Bastin3, Natália Machado4, Gaby langendijk5, Peter Hoffman6, Michal Belda4, Kwok Chun7, Tomas Halenka4, and the FPS-URB-RCC*
Andrés Simón-Moral et al.
  • 1Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA), CSIC-Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain (simon@ifca.unican.es)
  • 2Tecnalia, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), Astondo Bidea, Edificio 700, Parque Científico y Tecnológico de Bizkaia, Derio, Spain
  • 3LATMOS/IPSL, UVSQ-Univ. Paris Saclay, Sorbonne Universit´e, CNRS, CNES, Guyancourt, France
  • 4Charles University, Fac. of Mathematics and Physics, Dept. of Atmospheric Physics, Prague, Czechia
  • 5Climate Adaptation and Disaster Risk Department, Deltares, Delft, The Netherlands
  • 6Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, Hamburg, Deutschland
  • 7Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

The representation of local processes at the urban scale becomes highly important with the increase in resolution of regional climate models (RCMs). Current state-of-the-art RCMs do not typically include a sophisticated depiction of local urban-scale dynamics, which constrains our understanding of their interaction with regional climate. The Flagship Pilot Study on the Urban Environment and Regional Climate Change (FPS-URB-RCC) is a CORDEX initiative aimed at bridging this local-regional gap, with the main objective of enabling us to investigate how urban areas affect the regional climate and vice versa. This study uses simulations at 3 km and 12 km resolution  produced within the FPS URB-RCC STAGE-0 framework to analyze how the improved representation of urban areas modifies precipitation patterns in long-term simulations. With this aim, we consider simulations with different models, different urban parameterizations, and different representations of the urban areas, including simulations with no cities. The latter are used as reference, showing an apparent increase of average precipitation over Paris, when the urban area is considered. These preliminary results are further expanded to explore urban influence during convective and frontal precipitation events, assessing the relative importance of precipitation precursors, such as wind and moisture convergence, in the multi-model, multi-physics ensemble. The STAGE-0 experimental setup also allows us to assess the robustness of our results against the unforced internal model variability.

 

This work is part of projects PROTECT (PID2023-149997OA-I00) funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF/EU, and European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme IMPETUS4CHANGE (grant agreement No 101081555). JM and AS acknowledge funding by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO) and the European Commission NextGenerationEU (Regulation EU 2020/2094), through CSIC's Interdisciplinary Thematic Platform Clima (PTI-Clima)

FPS-URB-RCC:

Oscar brousse, Angelo Campanale, Katiana Constantinidou, Erika Coppola, Hendrik Feldmann, Lluis Fita, Rafiq Hamdi, Eleni katragkou, Aude Lemonsu, Eloisa Raluy-López, Pedro Matos Soares, Marcus thatcher, Fuxing Wang, Jiacan Yuan.

How to cite: Simón-Moral, A., Milovac, J., Fernández, J., Bastin, S., Machado, N., langendijk, G., Hoffman, P., Belda, M., Chun, K., and Halenka, T. and the FPS-URB-RCC: Urban influence on precipitation: insights from the FPS-URB-RCC regional climate simulations, 12th International Conference on Urban Climate, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 7–11 Jul 2025, ICUC12-1003, https://doi.org/10.5194/icuc12-1003, 2025.

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