A perspective on urban canopy layer modeling for weather, climate and air quality applications

Environmental issues and impacts to society will be exacerbated with increased population, diminishing resources and climate changes. Current models available for weather, climate and air quality applications are powerful state-of-science modeling systems can be employed to address the impact of these issues. This paper reviews a selected subset of such systems, considered representative of community-based publically available modeling systems and focus on their utilization for urban applications. Special attention is required given the complex and high degree of spatial inhomogeneity of the underlying surface areas. Such applications optimally require relatively fine grid meshes and scale appropriate science description for the varied and complex land surface atmospheric processes commensurate to the fine scale land surface variability structure. This article provides a brief review and perspective on means and science parameterizations for urban focused modeling in these major modeling systems. Several issues, limitations as well as innovative opportunities specific to the optimal operations of these urban systems, with focus on fine mesh size and data needs are identified and discussed.