International Workshop: Integration of WUDAPT with Modeling Systems

A one-day International Workshop “Integration of WUDAPT with Modeling Systems” will be convened at NCAR’s Foothill Lab (FL2-3107) Boulder, Colorado on Friday, January 13, 2023.  Its objective is to elucidate current and emerging outcomes of WUDAPT in meeting the needs of different models that currently function at different scales AND to anticipate the needs of future models that will permit multi-scale (global to local) approaches using variable grid resolutions adapted to urban landscapes. Such modeling systems are powerful tools that provide state of science-based approaches to addressing societal needs especially in the context of enhanced risks from increased urbanization and climate change scenarios.

The World Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) was initiated a decade ago as an international climate community project to support climate research on cities. WUDAPT seeks to overcome the data gap on global urban landscapes using consistent methods to acquire information on land-cover and land-use (LULC) that can be integrated in current and future climate models. While cities are major drivers of climate change (and especially exposed to the consequences), they remain largely absent from global modelling work, due to a scale mismatch between the grid resolution of current weather/climate models and the size and intensity of urban processes. At the same time, there are many models that have been designed for urban scale processes (e.g., air quality and building energy models) that operate in isolation from the larger scale models, which provide background conditions. Ideally, WUDAPT would generate urban data that satisfies different modelling needs (fit-for-purpose) in terms of coverage (variables), accuracy and precision (numerical and spatial). Progress to date by the WUDAPT includes (a) the capabilities to generate LCZ products and their associated UCP lookup tables for UCPs as city specific to regional to global maps suitable for current environmental models capable to performing urban (and intraurban) model applications; and developments of (b) methods that can generate form (e.g., gridded UCP maps) and function (GHG and Building energy models). Understanding data requirements to support emerging modeling systems such as Model Predictions Across Scales (MPAS) are needed.

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