Matthias Demuzere

Ruhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Department of Geography

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

In urban areas, high air temperatures and heat stress levels greatly affect human thermal comfort and public health, with climate change further increasing the mortality risks. This study presents a high resolution (100 m) modelling method, including detailed offline radiation calculations, that is able to efficiently calculate outdoor heat stress...

Improving the skill of Earth system models (ESMs) in representing climate-vegetation interactions is crucial to enhance our predictions of future climate and ecosystem functioning. Therefore, ESMs need to correctly simulate the impact of climate on vegetation, but likewise feedbacks of vegetation on climate must be adequately represented. However,...

Presentation given at the workshop on Statistical Hydrology 2019, Nanjing. Three rainfall occurrence correcting methods are combined with one univariate and one multivariate bias correction method, to study how these methods perform together.

Accurate snow depth observations are critical to assess water resources. More than a billion people rely on water from snow, most of which originates in the Northern Hemisphere mountain ranges. Yet, remote sensing observations of mountain snow depth are still lacking at the large scale. Here, we show the ability of Sentinel-1 to map snow depth in t...

Urban residents are exposed to higher levels of heat stress in comparison to the rural population. As this phenomenon could be enhanced by both global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and urban expansion, urban planners and policymakers should integrate both in their assessment. One way to consider these two concepts is by using urban climate models...

Over the last decade, Kunming has been subject to a strong urbanisation driven by rapid economic growth and socio-economic, topographical and proximity factors. As this urbanisation is expected to continue in the future, it is important to understand its environmental impacts and the role that spatial planning strategies and urbanisation regulation...

In this poster, 2 univariate en 3 multivariate bias correction techniques are compared to each other with regards to their performance for projecting extreme floods, given the COSMO-CLM with MPI-ESM boundary the conditions. Before this bias correction is done, three corrections of the occurrence of wet vs. dry days are applied, out of which SSR (St...

Improving the skill of Earth System Models (ESMs) in representing climate–vegetation interactions is crucial to enhance our predictions of future climate and ecosystem functioning. Therefore, ESMs need to correctly simulate the impact of climate on vegetation, but likewise, feedbacks of vegetation on climate must be adequately represented. However,...

The Atmospheric Pollution and Human Health in a Chinese Megacity (APHH-Beijing) programme is an international collaborative project focusing on understanding the sources, processes and health effects of air pollution in the Beijing megacity. APHH-Beijing brings together leading China and UK research groups, state-of-the-art infrastructure and air q...

Owing to computational advances, an ever growing percentage of regional climate simulations are being performed at convection-permitting scale (CPS, or a horizontal grid scale below 4 km). One particular area where CPS could be of added value is in future projections of extreme precipitation, particularly for short timescales (e.g. hourly). However...

Assessment of surface urban heat islands (SUHI) has been hampered by the lack of a consistent framework to permit consistent interpretation between cities. Local Climate Zones (LCZ) are a universal description of local scale landscape types based on expected variation at neighbourhood scale (≥1km 2) in and around cities. In this study, we investiga...

Cities are major drivers of environmental change at all scales and are especially at risk from the ensuing effects, which include poor air quality, flooding and heat waves. Typically, these issues are studied on a city-by-city basis owing to the spatial complexity of built landscapes, local topography and emission patterns. However, to ensure knowl...

Mean ‘moving’ fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean pervious fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean building fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

List of abbreviations. (PDF)

Mean impervious fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)

Mean tree fraction (%) per built LCZ class. (PNG)