{"title":"A sensitivity study of urbanization impacts on regional meteorology using a Bayesian functional analysis of variance.","authors":"Giacomo Moraglia, Matthew Bonas, Paola Crippa","doi":"10.1007/s00477-025-03032-x","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Urbanization affects atmospheric boundary layer dynamics by altering cloud formation and precipitation patterns through the urban heat island (UHI) effect, perturbed wind flows, and urban aerosols, that overall contribute to the urban rainfall effect (URE). This study analyzes an ensemble of numerical simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and its version with coupled chemistry and aerosols (WRF-Chem) through a Functional ANalysis Of VAriance (FANOVA) approach to isolate the urban signature from the regional climatology and to investigate the relative contributions of various mechanisms and drivers to the URE. Different metropolitan areas across the United States are analyzed and their urban land cover and anthropogenic emissions are replaced with dominant land-use categories such as grasslands or croplands and biogenic only emissions, as in neighboring regions. Our findings indicate a significant role of the urban land cover in impacting surface temperature and turbulent kinetic energy over the city, and precipitation patterns, both within and downwind of the urban environment. Moreover, simulations of a deep convection event suggest that the aerosols impact dominates the sign and spatial extent of the changes in the simulated precipitation compared to the UHI effect, leading to a significant precipitation enhancement within the urban borders and suppression in downwind regions.</p>","PeriodicalId":21987,"journal":{"name":"Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment","volume":"39 8","pages":"3605-3617"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12307560/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-025-03032-x","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/6/24 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENGINEERING, CIVIL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Urbanization affects atmospheric boundary layer dynamics by altering cloud formation and precipitation patterns through the urban heat island (UHI) effect, perturbed wind flows, and urban aerosols, that overall contribute to the urban rainfall effect (URE). This study analyzes an ensemble of numerical simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and its version with coupled chemistry and aerosols (WRF-Chem) through a Functional ANalysis Of VAriance (FANOVA) approach to isolate the urban signature from the regional climatology and to investigate the relative contributions of various mechanisms and drivers to the URE. Different metropolitan areas across the United States are analyzed and their urban land cover and anthropogenic emissions are replaced with dominant land-use categories such as grasslands or croplands and biogenic only emissions, as in neighboring regions. Our findings indicate a significant role of the urban land cover in impacting surface temperature and turbulent kinetic energy over the city, and precipitation patterns, both within and downwind of the urban environment. Moreover, simulations of a deep convection event suggest that the aerosols impact dominates the sign and spatial extent of the changes in the simulated precipitation compared to the UHI effect, leading to a significant precipitation enhancement within the urban borders and suppression in downwind regions.
期刊介绍:
Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (SERRA) will publish research papers, reviews and technical notes on stochastic and probabilistic approaches to environmental sciences and engineering, including interactions of earth and atmospheric environments with people and ecosystems. The basic idea is to bring together research papers on stochastic modelling in various fields of environmental sciences and to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas, for communicating on issues that cut across disciplinary barriers, and for the dissemination of stochastic techniques used in different fields to the community of interested researchers. Original contributions will be considered dealing with modelling (theoretical and computational), measurements and instrumentation in one or more of the following topical areas:
- Spatiotemporal analysis and mapping of natural processes.
- Enviroinformatics.
- Environmental risk assessment, reliability analysis and decision making.
- Surface and subsurface hydrology and hydraulics.
- Multiphase porous media domains and contaminant transport modelling.
- Hazardous waste site characterization.
- Stochastic turbulence and random hydrodynamic fields.
- Chaotic and fractal systems.
- Random waves and seafloor morphology.
- Stochastic atmospheric and climate processes.
- Air pollution and quality assessment research.
- Modern geostatistics.
- Mechanisms of pollutant formation, emission, exposure and absorption.
- Physical, chemical and biological analysis of human exposure from single and multiple media and routes; control and protection.
- Bioinformatics.
- Probabilistic methods in ecology and population biology.
- Epidemiological investigations.
- Models using stochastic differential equations stochastic or partial differential equations.
- Hazardous waste site characterization.