Ongoing climate change combined with urbanization means that European city dwellers might be confronted the coming decades with significant heat stress. Two complementary approaches can be used when studying urban climate. One can collect observations in urbanized landscapes and/or one could investigate the urban impact based on high-resolution atmospheric model experiments. In this proposal both strategies will be combined.
With the MOCCA (6 weather stations in Gent) and the VLINDER network (70 weather stations in Flanders & Brussels) we have built up expertise in urban meteorological observations. In this project we aim at bringing together data from multiple European cities to study on a European scale the urban climate (e.g. impact of green/water in multiple cities and climate zones). Moreover the data collected will be used to evaluate the performance of the ALARO-SURFEX model (used for operational weather forecasts in Belgium) over different European cities.