Lunch Talk Series by Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) Thrust, HKUST (GZ) - Impacts of Land-Atmosphere Interactions in High-resolution Regional Climate Modeling

Dynamic climate downscaling is essential to understanding climate change sciences and for developing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies at tempo-spatial scales relevant to stakeholder. Kilometer-scale Convection-Permitting Modeling (CPM) can capture extreme weather events and sub-daily precipitation characteristics (diurnal cycle, spatial structures, and extremes). Continental-scale WRF CPM climate downscaling simulations for current and future climatic conditions has greatly benefited from more accurate representation of land-surface processes, resulting in significant improvements in regional hydroclimate simulations. For instance, incorporating a groundwater model has helped mitigate dry and warm bias of WRF CPM simulations in U.S. Central Plains. Advancing the understanding of the nexus among climate, agriculture, water cycle, and urbanization has emerged as a new research frontier, and the research community started representing urbanization and agricultural management processes in earth-system models. This is critical to investigating land-atmosphere interactions and agriculture and urban sustainability and local climate-risk issues at societal-relevant scales. We discuss recent efforts in representing human-dimension (urbanization and agriculture management) in WRF to highlight the challenges for earth-system models to quantify cross-scale interactions between urbanization, agricultural management, hydrology, and climate systems. I will introduce urban climate and adaptation CARE program at HKUST and new initiatives from WMO World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and World Weather Research Program (WWRP) related to urban climate and weather research.