Impact of land use land cover on variation of urban heat island characteristics and surface energy fluxes using WRF and urban canopy model over metropolitan cities of India

The present study focuses on the assessment of urban heat island (UHI) and urban energy fluxes over Indian metropolitan cities. For this purpose, a high-resolution numerical Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and a coupled single-layer urban canopy model (WRF-UCM) has been implemented over Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad to evaluate the performance of these models in capturing the impact of urban areas in simulating the UHI over different land use land cover (LULC) classes. The model initial conditions are obtained from NCEP-FNL reanalysis data. The model simulations reveal that the air temperature at 2 m height (T2) and UHI intensity are overestimated by WRF whereas the WRF-UCM simulations are matching well with ERA5-Land reanalysis data considered as observations. For the WRF-UCM simulation, the statistical errors in T2 and UHI intensity are within the desirable limits and the index of agreement (IoA) is more than 0.8 over the built-up areas (BAs). By comparing with the satellite observations, the relative surface UHI is noticed to be better captured over the BA by WRF-UCM simulation. The sensible heat flux simulated by WRF is highly overestimated whereas WRF-UCM is in good agreement with the satellite observation over the BA. Interestingly, the latent heat flux is reasonably well simulated over all the LULC classes. The results derived from the present study have shown the performance of WRF-UCM in simulating the spatial variation of UHI and fluxes of sensible and latent heat-related varied LULC classifications over metropolitan cities of India.