Matthias Demuzere

B-Kode

High-quality climate information tailored to cities’ needs assists decision makers to prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts, as well as to support the targeted transition towards climate resilient cities. During the last decades, two main modelling approaches emerged to understand and analyse the urban climate and to generate information....

Improvements in high-resolution satellite remote sensing and computational advancements have sped up the development of global datasets that delineate urban land, crucial for understanding climate risks in our increasingly urbanizing world. Here, we analyze urban land cover patterns across spatiotemporal scales from several such current-generation...

For a number of years research has been carried out in several centres which has demonstrated the potential benefits of 100‐m scale models for a range of meteorological phenomena. More recently, some meteorological services have started to consider seriously the operational implementation of practical hectometric models. Many, but by no means all,...

High-resolution urban climate modeling has faced substantial challenges due to the absence of a globally consistent, spatially continuous, and accurate dataset to represent the spatial heterogeneity of urban surfaces and their biophysical properties. This deficiency has long obstructed the development of urban-resolving Earth System Models (ESMs) a...

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...

Selecting climate model projections is a common practice for regional and local studies. This process often relies on local rather than synoptic variables. Even when synoptic weather types are considered, these are not related to the variable or climate impact driver of interest. Therefore, most selection procedures may not sufficiently account for...

This dataset contains all training areas (TA) submitted to the LCZ Generator (Demuzere et al. 2021) since 2021-04-14. The LCZ Generator follows a crowdsourcing approach, making fast and easy LCZ-mapping available to the public, while collecting LCZ maps and TAs in a centralized, easy to access, location. The crowdsoucing approach overcomes the limi...

Soil properties and their associated hydro-physical parameters represent a significant source of uncertainty in Land Surface Models (LSMs) with consequent effects on simulated sub-surface thermal and moisture characteristics, surface energy exchanges and turbulent fluxes. These effects can result in large model differences particularly during extre...

Selecting climate model projections is a common practice for regional and local studies. This process often relies on local rather than synoptic variables. Even when synoptic weather types are considered, these are not related to the variable or climate impact driver of interest. Therefore, most selection procedures may not sufficiently account for...

The process of urbanisation has increased public health risks due to urban heat, risks that will be further exacerbated in future decades by climate change. However, the growing adoption of integrated water management (IWM) practices (coordinated stormwater management of water, land, and resources) provides an opportunity to support urban heat amel...

Improvements in high-resolution satellite remote sensing and computational advancements have sped up the development of global datasets that delineate urban land, crucial for understanding climate risks in our increasingly urbanizing world. Here, we analyze urban land cover patterns across spatiotemporal scales from several such current-generation...

Urbanization has altered land surface properties driving changes in micro-climates. Urban form influences people’s activities, environmental exposures, and health. Developing detailed and unified longitudinal measures of urban form is essential to quantify these relationships. Local Climate Zones [LCZ] are a culturally-neutral urban form classifica...

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...

Against the backdrop of climate change, heat waves have become increasingly detrimental to cities. Urban morphology, a comprehensive reflection of material and non-material elements in the physical world, is closely related to environmental quality, thermal environment, population health, and other elements. From the perspective of urban morphologi...

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...

While projected urban air temperatures under climate change and urbanization have received attention, projections of pedestrian thermal stress are scarce and usually produced by statistical downscaling. In this study, we present and evaluate a dynamical downscaling methodology to assess urban outdoor thermal exposure. We dynamically downscale Earth...

The local climate zone (LCZ) system provides a universal classification mechanism for urban and natural landscapes and plays an increasingly important role in urban climate research. With the rapid development of various LCZ mapping methods, a thorough survey of the LCZ mapping literature is urgently needed to better understand current progress, ch...

This work describes the development of a hybrid 100-m global land cover dataset and its implementation in the state-of-the-art Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.5. This hybrid CGLC-MODIS-LCZ dataset is based on 1) the Copernicus Global Land Service Land Cover (CGLC) product resampled to MODIS IGBP classes (CGLC-MODIS), and 2) t...

The assessment of future extremes is hindered by the lack of long time series. Weather generators can alleviate this problem, but easily become more complex when generating multiple variables. In this study, a weather generator combining Bartlett-Lewis models and vine copulas is presented. The combination of these models allows for the stochastic a...

The CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study ELVIC (climate Extremes in the Lake VICtoria basin) was recently established to investigate how extreme weather events will evolve in this region of the world and to provide improved information for the climate impact community. Here we assess the added value of the convection-permitting scale simulations on the repr...

Urban morphology exerts an important influence on human settlements and serves to promote sustainable development. However, few studies have focused on the three dimensions (3D) of urban morphology. Therefore, to explore 3D urban morphological characteristics and transformations, we adopted a standard urban morphology classification scheme, the loc...

Detailed spatial and temporal micrometeorological data are crucial for tracking extreme heat and evaluating the heat mitigation potential of different strategies in cities. Field campaigns were performed in the city of Novi Sad (Serbia) on hot summer days during the period 2020-2022 to quantify the thermal conditions across the city. The micrometeo...

There is a scientific consensus on the need for spatially detailed information on urban landscapes at a global scale. These data can support a range of environmental services, since cities are places of intense resource consumption and waste generation and of concentrated infrastructure and human settlement exposed to multiple hazards of natural an...

A global 100 m spatial resolution Local Climate Zone (LCZ) map, derived from multiple earth observation datasets and expert LCZ class labels. The corresponding journal publication is available here: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/3835/2022/essd-14-3835-2022.html

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges currently faced by society, with an impact on many systems, such as the hydrological cycle. To assess this impact in a local context, regional climate model (RCM) simulations are often used as input for rainfall-runoff models. However, RCM results are still biased with respect to the observations. Man...

The scientific field of urban climatology has long investigated the two-way interactions between cities and their overlying atmosphere through in-situ observations and climate simulations at various scales. Novel research directions now emerge through recent advancements in sensing and communication technologies, algorithms, and data sources. Coupl...

There is a scientific consensus on the need for spatially detailed information on urban landscapes at a global scale. This data can support a range of environmental services, as cities are acknowledged as places of intense resource consumption and waste generation and foci of population and infrastructure that are exposed to multiple hazards of nat...

Both climate change and rapid urbanization accelerate exposure to heat in the city of Kampala, Uganda. From a network of low-cost temperature and humidity sensors, operational in 2018-2019, we derive the daily mean, minimum and maximum Humidex in order to quantify and explain intra-urban heat stress variation. This temperature-humidity index is sho...

This study evaluates the impact of land surface models (LSMs) and urban heterogeneity [using local climate zones (LCZs)] on air temperature simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) during a regional extreme event. We simulated the 2017 heatwave over Europe considering four scenarios, using WRF coupled with two LSMs (i.e., Noah...

The CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study ELVIC (climate Extremes in the Lake VICtoria basin) was recently established to investigate how extreme weather events will evolve in this region of the world and to provide improved information for the climate impact community. Here we assess the added value of the convection-permitting scale simulations on the repr...

In recent years, the collection and utilisation of crowdsourced data has gained attention in atmospheric sciences and citizen weather stations (CWS), i.e., privately-owned weather stations whose owners share their data publicly via the internet, have become increasingly popular. This is particularly the case for cities, where traditional measuremen...

Urban climate features, such as the urban heat island (UHI), are determined by various factors characterizing the modifications of the surface by the built environment and human activity. These factors are often attributed to the local spatial scale (hundreds of meters up to several kilometers). Nowadays, more and more urban climate studies utilize...

Rapid urbanization has changed the physical urban morphology, and results in various environmental problems, one is the urban heat island effect. In this paper, we use multi-source satellite remote sensing data (e.g., Landsat series and Sentinel series) and deep-learning technology to identify and analyze the three-dimensional (3D) urban morphology...

Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization in tropical Africa is increasingly leading to unprecedented socio-economical and environmental challenges in cities, particularly urban heat and climate change. The latter calls for a better representation of tropical African cities' properties relevant for urban climate studies. Here, we demonstrate the possibil...

Presentation given at STAHY 2021.

This study uses the statistical and meta-analysis methods to comprehensively review 324 LCZ papers during 2012-2020, 202 of which are categorized as LCZ mapping papers. We present a bibliometric analysis of LCZ mapping papers from literature statistics, research topics, city distribution, institutions and cooperation, and research projects.

Bias adjustment of climate model simulations is a common step in the climate impact assessment modeling chain. For precipitation intensity, multiple bias-adjusting methods have been developed, but less so for precipitation occurrence. Intensity-bias-adjusting methods such as ‘Quantile Delta Mapping’ can adjust too many wet days, but not too many dr...

Since their introduction in 2012, Local Climate Zones (LCZs) emerged as a new standard for characterizing urban landscapes, providing a holistic classification approach that takes into account micro-scale land-cover and associated physical properties. In 2015, as part of the community-based World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) proj...

The increase in built surfaces constitutes the main reason for the formation of the Urban Heat Island (UHI), that is a metropolitan area significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas. The urban heat islands and other urban-induced climate feedbacks may amplify heat stress and urban flooding under climate change and therefore to predict them...

In November 2017, floods in Impfondo, Congo forced evacuations and damaged crops, homes, and roads. The World Food Programme (WFP) supported the government’s response by providing food aid but was delayed by one month due to inadequate information. To enable faster flood response, WFP partnered with Cloud to Street to develop a near real-time Congo...

This study explores the multi-temporal Local Climate Zone mapping of large functional urban areas in Canada (Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg), for seven census years between 1986-2016. While this has been done before by a few others, none of these studies go back that far in time, nor apply the approach on as m...

Urban canopy parameters (UCPs) are essential in order to accurately model the complex interplay between urban areas and their environment. This study compares three different approaches to define the UCPs for Moscow (Russia), using the COSMO numerical weather prediction and climate model coupled to TERRA_URB urban parameterization. In addition to t...

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges currently faced by society, with an impact on many systems, such as the hydrological cycle. To locally assess this impact, Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations are often used as input for hydrological rainfall-runoff models. However, RCM results are still biased with respect to the observations. M...

Malaria burden is increasing in sub-Saharan cities because of rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Yet very few studies have studied the interactions between urban environments and malaria. Additionally, no standardized urban land-use/land-cover has been defined for urban malaria studies. Here, we demonstrate the potential of local climate zones (L...

Background: The rapid and often uncontrolled rural-urban migration in Sub-Saharan Africa is transforming urban landscapes expected to provide shelter for more than 50% of Africa's population by 2030. Consequently, the burden of malaria is increasingly affecting the urban population, while socio-economic inequalities within the urban settings are i...

Although continental urban areas are relatively small, they are major drivers of environmental change at local, regional and global scales. Moreover, they are especially vulnerable to these changes owing to the concentration of population and their exposure to a range of hydro-meteorological hazards, emphasizing the need for spatially detailed info...

This is a comment to the paper "Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population" by Manoli et al. (2019, Nature 573 p. 55-60; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1512-9)

In multi-class classification tasks such as land cover mapping, the achieved accuracies inherently depend on the complexity of the class typology. More specifically, the more complex the typology of (land cover) classes, the lower the resulting accuracies, since the common measures only consider whether a sample was correctly classified or not. To...

This poster gives an overview of our research on the comparison of univariate and multivariate bias-adjusting methods for hydrological climate change impact. We compared one univariate and three multivariate bias-adjusting methods using recent timeframes influenced by climate change. By combining this information with the R index for bias stationar...

Plain Language Summary The Greenland ice sheet encloses vast amounts of liquid water beneath its surface, within a layer of old compacted snow referred to as firn. These water reservoirs, named firn aquifers, are a peculiar feature with potentially widespread impacts on ice sheet temperature, hydrology, and contribution to sea level. Monitoring aqu...

This study aims at assessing and understanding the impact of recent urbanization on the (surface) urban heat island ((S)UHI) under clear‐sky conditions in a tropical African city using different sources of remotely sensed data sets together with an urban climate model (UCM). The observed SUHI during clear sky conditions is found to be about 4°C on...

Convection-permitting models (CPMs) have been proven successful in simulating extreme precipitation statistics. However, when such models are used to study climate change, contrasting sensitivities with respect to resolution (CPM vs. models with parameterized convection) are found for different parts of the world. In this study, we explore to which...

Aiming for an improved understanding of the different factors that determine the regional climate of the Lake Victoria Basin, the COSMO-CLM regional climate model is set up in a tropical, convection-permitting configuration and is directly nested in a recent reanalysis product (ERA5). The convection-permitting simulation outperforms state-of-the-ar...