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Evaluation of the Town Energy Balance (TEB) scheme with direct measurements from dry districts in two cities.

American Meteorological Society

The Town Energy Balance (TEB) model of Masson simulates turbulent fluxes for urban areas. It is forced with atmospheric data and radiation recorded above roof level and incorporates detailed representations of the urban surface (canyon geometry) to simulate energy balances for walls, roads, and roofs. Here the authors evaluate TEB using directly measured surface temperatures and local-scale energy balance and radiation fluxes for two ‘‘simple’’ urban sites: a downtown area within the historic core of Mexico City, Mexico (stone buildings five to six stories in height), and a light industrial site in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (flat-roofed, single-story warehouses). At both sites, vegetation cover is less than 5%, which permits direct evaluation of TEB in the absence of a coupled vegetation scheme. Following small modifications to TEB, notably to the aerodynamic resistance formulations, the model is shown to perform well overall. In Mexico City, with deep urban canyons and stone walls, almost two-thirds of the net radiation is partitioned into storage heat flux during the day, and this maintains large heat releases and an upward turbulent sensible heat flux at night. TEB simulates all of these features well. At both sites TEB correctly simulates the net radiation, surface temperatures, and the partitioning between the turbulent and storage heat fluxes. The composite wall temperature simulated by TEB is close to the average of the four measured wall temperatures. A sensitivity analysis of model parameters shows TEB is fairly robust; for the conditions considered here, TEB is most sensitive to roof characteristics and incoming solar radiation. Copyright 2002 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or copyright@ametsoc.org.

Text

2011-07-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/35936

Masson, V.; Grimmond, C.S.B.; Oke, Timothy R. 2002. Evaluation of the Town Energy Balance (TEB) scheme with direct measurements from dry districts in two cities Journal of Applied Meteorology 41(10) 1011-1026

Faculty

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/