Do ERA5/ERA5 Land datasets account for the heat Island effect? For example, if coordinates of the data point are within a big city? Such as New York, Paris, Moscow, etc?
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Do ERA5/ERA5 Land datasets account for the heat Island effect? For example, if coordinates of the data point are within a big city? Such as New York, Paris, Moscow, etc?
3 Comments
Michela Giusti
Please have a look at IFS model documentation CY45R1 for ERA5-Land and IFS model documentation CY41R2 for ERA5
Tristan Ballard
I'm not seeing any mention of features that would directly account for urban heat island effects, but short answer is kind of.
From a recent paper:
"ERA5 does not represent urban areas. McNorton et al (2021) proposed a new urban scheme for the ECMWF model showing that only large cities had some signal at 9km resolution, with a negligible impact at 30km resolution, which is similar to ERA5. However, ERA5 assimilates observations from ground weather stations (including 2-meter temperature, snow depth and relative humidity), and remote sensing data (Hersbach et al., 2020). Therefore, ERA5 should still be able to represent some sort of urban signal over large city-gridpoints."
*I'm not an expert at all on this, so open to feedback from more experienced users/developers.
Natalia Odnoletkova
Dear Tristan,
Thank you for your comment. From my experience, I also did not notice any significant variations in ERA5 values in the middle of the cities and at the outskirts. So maybe even if it represents some heat island effect, it is not noticeable at this resolution. Thank you for the citation of relevant articles!