ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the meso-scale meteorological models implementation in the urban context, with emphasis on the adaptation of meso-scale meteorological models to the case studies that were selected in the framework of the BRIDGE project. The chapter describes a new solution to handle the range of time and length scales which influence urban climate predictions in a computationally tractable way. Meso-scale atmospheric models are increasingly employed to improve the understanding of processes that are related to neighbourhood-scale climate and air quality, the Urban Heat Island (UHI), and meso-scale circulations caused by urban land cover. The Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF) meso-scale model was used to simulate meteorological variables through numerical simulations of the atmospheric flows based on the Navier-Stokes equations. It was developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). The results for analyzing the urban metabolism at high spatial resolution are very promising.
