Gert-Jan Steeneveld

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Wageningen University & Research

The Diurnal Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (DICE) aims to explore the complex interactions between the land surface and atmospheric boundary layer, which are generally not well understood and difficult to isolate in models. The project involves over 10 different models, combining expertise from both land‐surface and atmospheric boundary‐layer...

The Urban Wind Island (UWI), a small but persistent positive mean boundary-layer wind anomaly over the city as a whole, has previously been revealed using a simplified conceptual model of the convective atmospheric boundary layer. This study extends the UWI research into less idealised cases by using the three-dimensional WRF mesoscale model for Am...

Urban Land Surface Models (ULSMs) simulate energy and water exchanges between the urban surface and atmosphere. However, earlier systematic ULSM comparison projects assessed the energy balance but ignored the water balance, which is coupled to the energy balance. Here, we analyze the water balance representation in 19 ULSMs participating in the Urb...

Ongoing climate change is increasing summertime temperatures, and frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Europe, which can threaten human health. Relatively little is known about how quickly outdoor heat penetrates into residences during heatwaves. Long-term and systematic networks recording indoor temperatures are challenging to install and maint...

Evapotranspiration (ET) $(ET)$ is a key process in the hydrological cycle that can help mitigate urban heat. ET $ET$ depends on the surface cover, as the surface affects the partitioning of precipitation between runoff and evapotranspiration. In urban neighborhoods, this surface cover is highly heterogeneous. The resulting neighborhood‐scale ET $ET...

The effect of modified equator‐to‐pole temperature gradients on the jet stream by low‐level polar warming and upper‐level tropical warming is not fully understood. We perform aquaplanet simulations to quantify the impact of different sea surface temperature distributions on jet stream strength, large wave amplitudes and extreme waviness. The respon...

The morphological complexity of urban environments results in a high spatial and temporal variability of the urban microclimate. The consequent demand for high-resolution atmospheric data remains a challenge for atmospheric research and operational application. The recent widespread availability and increasing adoption of low-cost mobile sensing of...

Heat stress is the leading climate-related cause of premature deaths in Europe. Major heatwaves have struck Europe recently and are expected to increase in magnitude and length. Large cities are particularly threatened due to the urban morphology and imperviousness. Green spaces mitigate heat, providing cooling services through shade provision and...

This article provides high-resolution information on the projected changes in annual extreme rainfall and high- and low-streamflow events over Southeast Asia under extreme climate change. The analysis was performed using the bias-corrected result of the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) multi-model experiment for the period...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key process in the hydrological cycle that can help mitigate urban heat. ET depends on the surface cover, as the surface affects the partitioning of precipitation between runoff and evapotranspiration. In urban neighborhoods, this surface cover is highly heterogeneous. The resulting neighborhood-scale ET is observed wit...

Urban Land Surface Models (ULSMs) simulate energy and water exchanges between the urban surface and atmosphere. When part of numerical weather prediction, ULSMs provide a lower boundary for the atmosphere and improve the applicability of model results in the urban environment compared with non-urban land surface models. However, earlier systematic...

The effect of modified equator-to-pole temperature gradients on the jet stream by low-level polar warming and upper-level tropical warming on jet streams is not fully understood. We perform four aquaplanet simulations to quantify the impact of different sea surface temperature distributions on jet stream strength, wave amplitudes and jet stream wav...

The morphological complexity of urban environments results in a high spatial and temporal variability of the urban microclimate. The consequent demand for highly-resolution atmospheric data remains a challenge for atmospheric research and operational application. The recent widespread availability and increasing adoption of low-cost mobile sensing...

Land cover controls the land‐atmosphere exchange of water and energy through the partitioning of solar energy into latent and sensible heat. Observations over all land cover types at the regional scale are required to study these turbulent flux dynamics over a landscape. Here, we aim to study how the control of daily and midday latent and sensible...

Accurately predicting weather and climate in cities is critical for safeguarding human health and strengthening urban resilience. Multimodel evaluations can lead to model improvements; however, there have been no major intercomparisons of urban‐focussed land surface models in over a decade. Here, in Phase 1 of the Urban‐PLUMBER project, we evaluate...

Within the period 2014–2017, five hail events were reported in the city of Surabaya in Indonesia. Although deep convection commonly develops over the Maritime Continent, severe thunderstorms triggering hail events develop less frequently as specific atmospheric conditions are required. The rapid urbanization in Surabaya might have led to increased...

This conceptual, qualitative interdisciplinary research investigates, systematically and holistically, climate-adaptive spatial design interventions for high-density informal urban areas in arid climates, which remain understudied despite their vulnerability to heat stress and the heat-vulnerable groups populating them. Five streetscape design prot...

Research indicates that water in small water bodies has negligible cooling effects, but also that its surrounding environment can be designed to become cooler by applying the ‘cooling urban water environments’ concept. However, this concept was created for generic urban environments and not tested in practice. This study applies this concept to a s...

In October 2021, the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) has awarded four years (2021-2025) of funding to the “FAIR network of micrometeorological measurement” (FAIRNESS). The project action supporting knowledge exchange and foster a strong background for future research and innovation focused on micrometeorological measurements a...

This study aims to unravel and quantify the impact of sea surface temperature (SST) on the formation, intensity, structure and track of the Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone (medicane) Ianos occurred on 15–20 September 2020 at the central Mediterranean. This study, thus, demonstrates how Ianos would be in past and future climate conditions, assum...

Meteorology and weather forecasting are crucial for water-limited agriculture. We evaluate the added value of downscaling seven-months global deterministic seasonal forecasts from the Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2) using the Weather, Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over Zimbabwe for ten growing seasons (2011-2021). Downscaling reduc...

Although the need for climate adaptation and mitigation interventions in the urban realm has been widely acknowledged, comparative analyses of the extent to which such interventions combine the two sides of climate action are scarce. This study examines which climate-responsive design interventions can successfully facilitate climate adaptation and...

Dry deposition to the surface is one of the main removal pathways of tropospheric ozone (O 3). We quantified for the first time the impact of O 3 deposition to the Arctic sea ice on the planetary boundary layer (PBL) O 3 concentration and budget using year-round flux and concentration observations from the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for...

We present the CarbonTracker Europe High-Resolution (CTE-HR) system that estimates carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange over Europe at high resolution (0.1 × 0.2∘) and in near real time (about 2 months' latency). It includes a dynamic anthropogenic emission model, which uses easily available statistics on economic activity, energy use, and weather to gene...

This article provides high-resolution information on the projected changes in annual extreme rainfall and high and low streamflow events over Southeast Asia under extreme climate change. The analysis was performed using the bias-corrected result of the High-resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) multi-model experiment for the period...

This study configures the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with the updated urban fraction for optimal rainfall simulation over Kampala, Uganda. The urban parameter values associated with urban fractions are adjusted based on literature reviews. An extreme rainfall event that triggered a flood hazard in Kampala on 25 June 2012 is used f...

Ongoing urbanization highlights the need for a better understanding and high resolution modelling of the urban climate. In this study, we combine rural observations by WMO surface stations, weather radar data and urban crowd‐sourced observations with very fine‐scale modelling efforts for Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As a model, we use the Weather Re...

Modelling rainfall extremes and dry periods over the Southeast Asia (SEA) region is challenging due to the characteristics of the region, which consists of the Maritime Continent and a mountainous region; it also experiences monsoonal conditions, as it is located between the Asian summer monsoon and the Australian summer monsoon. Representing rainf...

We present the CarbonTracker Europe High-Resolution system that estimates carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange over Europe at high-resolution (0.1 x 0.2°) and in near real-time (about 2 months latency). It includes a dynamic fossil fuel emission model, which uses easily available statistics on economic activity, energy-use, and weather to generate fossil...

A realistic representation of the stable atmospheric boundary layer in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models is still a challenge. We study the evolution of a stable boundary layer over snow‐covered sea ice in Bothnian Bay during wintertime in 2018. We perform high‐resolution model experiments with the Weather Research and Forecasti...

The measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 included restrictions of people's mobility and reductions in economic activities. These drastic changes in daily life, enforced through national lockdowns, led to abrupt reductions of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in urbanized areas all over the world. To examine the effect of social restri...

Water storage plays an important role in mitigating heat and flooding in urban areas. Assessment of the water storage capacity of cities remains challenging due to the inherent heterogeneity of the urban surface. Traditionally, effective storage has been estimated from runoff. Here, we present a novel approach to estimate effective water storage ca...

An intercomparison between 10 single-column (SCM) and 5 large-eddy simulation (LES) models is presented for a radiation fog case study inspired by the Local and Non-local Fog Experiment (LANFEX) field campaign. Seven of the SCMs represent single-column equivalents of operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, whilst three are research-g...

Understanding the physical processes that affect the turbulent structure of the nocturnal urban boundary layer (UBL) is essential to improve forecasts of air quality and the air temperature in urban areas. Low-level jets (LLJs) have been shown to affect turbulence in the nocturnal UBL. We investigate the interaction of a mesoscale LLJ with the UBL...

An intercomparison between 10 single-column (SCM) and 5 large-eddy simulation (LES) models is presented for a radiation fog case study inspired by the LANFEX field campaign. 7 of the SCMs represent single-column equivalents of operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, whilst 3 are research-grade SCMs designed for fog simulation, and th...

Representing the rainy season of the maritime continent is a challenge for global and regional climate models. Here, we compare regional climate models (RCMs) based on the coupled model intercomparison project phase 5 (CMIP5) model generation with high‐resolution global climate models with a comparable spatial resolution from the HighResMIP experim...

This study improves surface wind predictions in an unresolved valley using an artificial neural network (ANN). We assess the quality of 3-km wind forecasts by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the potential of post-processing by an ANN within the 1-2km wide Cadarache Valley in southeast France. Operational wind forecasts for 110m...

The ongoing urbanization requires enhanced understanding of the local meteorological and climatological conditions within the urban environment for multiple applications, concerning energy demand, human health, and spatial planning. Identifying areas with harmful meteorological conditions enables citizens and local authorities to take actions to op...

We report on renewing the undergraduate course about synoptic meteorology and weather forecasting at Wageningen University (The Netherlands) to meet the current-day require-ments of operational forecasters. Weather strongly affects human activities through its im-pact on transportation, energy demand planning and personal safety, especially in the...

The ongoing urbanization and climate change urges further understanding and monitoring of weather in cities. Two case studies during a 17-day period over the Amsterdam metropolitan area, the Netherlands, are used to illustrate the potential and limitations of hydrometeorological monitoring using nontraditional and opportunistic sensors. We employ t...

Dry deposition is an important removal mechanism for tropospheric ozone (O3). Currently, O3 deposition to oceans in atmospheric chemistry and transport models (ACTMs) is generally represented using constant surface uptake resistances. This occurs despite the role of solubility, waterside turbulence and O3 reacting with ocean water reactants such as...

Fog is a critical weather phenomenon for safety and operations in aviation. Unfortunately, the forecasting of radiation fog remains challenging due to the numerous physical processes that play a role and their complex interactions, in addition to the vertical and horizontal resolution of the numerical models. In this study we evaluate the performan...

More and more often direct and indirect weather-related observations from non-conventional sources are being investigated for their use in the atmospheric sciences. In fact, as the spatial resolution of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models increases steadily so does the need for weather observations for data assimilation or validation purposes...

The use of crowdsourcing – obtaining large quantities of data through the Internet – has been of great value in urban meteorology. Crowdsourcing has been used to obtain urban air temperature, air pressure, and precipitation data from sources such as mobile phones or personal weather stations (PWSs), but so far wind data have not been researched. Ur...

Water storage plays an important role in mitigating heat and flooding in urban areas. Assessment of the capacity of cities to store water remains challenging due to the extreme heterogeneity of the urban surface. Traditionally, effective storage has been estimated from runoff. Here, we present a novel approach to estimate water storage capacity fro...

Simulating high-intensity rainfall events that trigger local floods using a Numerical Weather Prediction model is challenging as rain-bearing systems are highly complex and localized. In this study, we analyze the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model's capability in simulating a high-intensity rainfall event using a varie...

With the purpose of revising World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (WMO/CIMO) Guide #8 on weather stations siting, an experiment to evaluate metrologically the maximum influence of a paved road on 2‐m air temperature measurements (“road siting effect”) has been designed, installed and run in Italy...

Dry deposition is an important removal mechanism for tropospheric ozone (O3). Currently, O3 deposition to oceans in atmospheric chemistry and transport models (ACTMs) is generally represented using constant surface uptake resistances. This is despite the fact that considering the role of solubility, waterside turbulence and O3 reacting with ocean w...

High-resolution, regularly gridded air-temperature maps are frequently used in climatology, hydrology, and ecology. Within the Netherlands, 34 official automatic weather stations (AWSs) are operated by the National Met Service according to World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standards. Although the measurements are of high quality, the spatial...

The Innovative Strategies for Observations in the Arctic Atmospheric Boundary Layer Program (ISOBAR) is a research project investigating stable atmospheric boundary layer (SBL) processes, whose representation still poses significant challenges in state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. In ISOBAR ground-based flux and profile obs...

On the evening of 23 June 2016 around 18:00 UTC, a mesoscale convective system (MCS) with hail and wind gusts passed the southern province Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands, and caused 675 millions of euros damage. This study evaluates the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting model with three cumulus parameterisation schemes (Betts–Mi...

Urban canopy models (UCMs) are parametrization schemes that are used to improve weather forecasts in urban areas. The performance of UCMs depends on understanding potential uncertainty sources that can generally originate from the (a) urban surface parameters, (b) atmospheric forcing, and (c) physical description. Here, we investigate the relative...

Urban areas are vulnerable to intensive heatwave periods. In order to understand heat stress in cities, the single-layer urban canopy model (SLUCM) coupled with the weather research and forecasting model (WRF) have been widely used to quantify and forecast the urban climate. However, the model performance in WRF/SLUCM is limited by the coarse class...

Regional weather forecasting models like the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model allow for nested domains to save computational effort and still provide detailed results for mesoscale weather phenomena. The sudden resolution change by nesting can may cause artefacts in the model results. On the contrary, The the novel global Model for Pred...

The use of crowdsourcing – obtaining large quantities of data through the Internet – has been of great value in urban meteorology. Crowdsourcing has been used to obtain urban air temperature, air pressure, and precipitation data from sources such as mobile phones or personal weather stations (PWSs), but so far wind data have not been researched. Ur...

In the Netherlands, municipalities and other sub-national governments have to conduct climate stress tests to examine the societal impact of heat load by citizens. So far, these parties have been hindered by the abundance of contrasting urban heat maps produced with different metrics and methods by different agencies. To unify the stress tests, we...

Cities largely affect boundary-layer climates due to complex surface structures, pollutant emissions, and anthropogenic heat release. As urban populations are expanding worldwide, insight is required into the urban surface radiation and energy balance and urban greenhouse gas fluxes. However, little long-term flux measurement records are available...

Offshore wind energy production is rapidly growing as an essential element in the sustainable energy share. Wind energy siting studies require accurate wind data, and in particular the knowledge of extreme wind events (low‐level jets, wind ramps, extreme shear and high wind speeds) is crucial for resource and load assessment. This study evaluates t...

The ongoing urbanisation and climate change urges further understanding and monitoring of weather in cities. Two case studies during a 17-day period over the Amsterdam metropolitan area, the Netherlands, are used to illustrate the potential and limitations of hydrometeorological monitoring using non-traditional and opportunistic sensors. We employ...

Steden zijn vaak warmer dan hun omgeving. Dit kan nadelige gevolgen hebben voor de menselijke gezond-heid, arbeidsproductiviteit, het energieverbruik, kritieke infrastructuur en de kwaliteit van het drinkwater. Tijdens de hittegolf van juli 2019 werden zeven beweegbare bruggen op de Amstelroute voor vijf dagen gesloten. Hoogheemraadschap De Stichts...

In this article an analysis of urban rainfall from hourly to seasonal scales is conducted for the Netherlands, with a focus on its capital, Amsterdam. In addition, the potential of synoptic weather types and local wind directions to categorize extreme rainfall in Amsterdam is assessed. An analysis of gauge‐adjusted daily radar rainfall retrievals w...

Numerical weather prediction models have become widespread tools that are accessible to a variety of communities, ranging from academia and the national meteorological services to commercial weather providers, wind and solar energy industries, and air quality modelers. Mesoscale meteorological models that are used to refine relatively coarse global...

Most of the effects caused by fog are negative for humans. Yet, numerical weather prediction (NWP) models still have problems to simulate fog properly, especially in operational forecasts. In the case of radiation fog, this is partially caused by the large sensitivity to many aspects, such as the synoptic and local conditions, the near-surface turb...

The temperature is rising due to climate change, resulting in more heat waves and more hot days and nights. All government agencies (municipalities, provincial governments and water boards) in the Netherlands must therefore identify the bottlenecks relating to flooding, heat, drought and floods before 2020. RIVM has proposed standardising the 'test...

The temperature is rising due to climate change, resulting in more heat waves and more hot days and nights. All government agencies (municipalities, provincial governments and water boards) in the Netherlands must therefore identify the bottlenecks relating to flooding, heat, drought and floods before 2020. RIVM has proposed standardising the 'test...

To reduce the vulnerability of urban areas facing high temperatures, it is useful to develop methods to obtain the urban heat island (UHI) intensity. However, it is hard to equip all cities with extensive measurement networks and alternative UHI diagnostic methods are needed. Accordingly, in this paper we evaluate and revise the diagnostic equation...

Ten years of ERA5 reanalysis data are combined with met-mast and lidar observations from 10 offshore platforms to investigate low-level jet characteristics over the Dutch North Sea. The objective of this study is to combine the best of two worlds: (1) ERA5 data with a large spatiotemporal extent but inherent accuracy limitations due to a relatively...

In this study, the sensitivity of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to predict life-cycle of a dense fog occurred on the 23-24 January 2016 is evaluated using different model configurations. For the first time the Intensive Observational Periods (IOPs) were made during the unique WInter Fog EXperiment (WIFEX) took place over Delhi, India...

Urban canopy models are essential tools for forecasting weather and air quality in cities. However, they require many surface parameters, which are uncertain and can reduce model performance if inappropriately prescribed. Here, we evaluate the model sensitivity of the single‐layer urban canopy model (SLUCM) in the Weather Research and Forecasting (...

Physical processes relevant for the dissipation of thick, continental fog after sunrise are studied through observations from the SIRTA observatory and idealized sensitivity studies with the large‐eddy simulation model DALES. Observations of 250 fog events over 7 years show that more than half of the fog dissipations after sunrise are transitions t...

Ten years of ERA5 reanalysis data are combined with met-mast and LiDAR observations from ten offshore platforms to investigate low-level jet characteristics over the Dutch North Sea. The objective of this study is to combine the best of two worlds: (1) ERA5 data with large spatiotemporal extent but inherent accuracy limitations due to a relatively...

In this study, we improve the Weather Research and Forecasting mesoscale model (WRF) performance by incorporating observations of a variety of sources using data assimilation and nudging techniques on a resolution up to 100 meter for urban areas. Our final goal is to create a 15 year climatological urban re-analysis data archive of (hydro)meteorolo...

Numerical weather prediction models play an important role in the field of wind energy, for example, in power forecasting, resource assessment, wind farm (wake) simulations, and load assessment. Continuous evaluation of their performance is crucial for successful operations and further understanding of meteorology for wind energy purposes. However,...

Wind is a key component of the urban climate due to its relevance for ventilation of air pollution and urban heat, wind nuisance, as well as for urban wind energy engineering. These winds are governed by the dynamics of the atmosphere closest to the surface, the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). Making use of a conceptual bulk model of the ABL, we...

In the Netherlands there is an urgent need for additional housing by 2040, which mainly has to be realized within the built environment. In this data driven study, we investigate the effect of different urban planning strategies on heat stress for the current climate and future climate scenarios for the agglomeration of The Hague in the year 2050....

The aim of the research project “Innovative Strategies for Observations in the Arctic Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ISOBAR)” is to substantially increase the understanding of the stable atmospheric boundary layer (SBL) through a combination of well-established and innovative observation methods as well as by models of different complexity. During thr...

Near-surface turbulent flux and radiation divergence field observations are analyzed over a grass-covered surface located at the Wageningen observatory, the Netherlands. Net radiative flux divergence appears to be a large component of the energy budget near the surface, accounting for a cooling rate of several tens of degrees per day. Longwave radi...