CLARITY Climate Services - Supporting Urban Climate Change Resilience and Adaptive Planning through Modelling of Possible Climate Adaptation Strategies

Urban areas and traffic infrastructure are especially vulnerable to climate change impacts. Heat waves, together with urban heat island effects represent a climate related concern that particularly affects cities, resulting from an interplay of climate warming, densification of urban areas, vegetation loss and increased sealed surfaces.

The CLARITY project (EU-Horizon 2020, www.clarity-h2020.eu) aims at implementing a climate service tool designed for assessing climate change induced hazards and for considering possible adaptation strategies in order to improve resilience measures at the urban level and to support urban infrastructure development. Using a dynamical-statistical downscaling approach, information on climate change and related climate extremes can be assessed on the urban scale by combining future climate projections provided by the EURO-CORDEX project with urban climate simulations.

Here, we use the dynamical urban climate model MUKLIMO_3, developed by DWD, to provide high-resolution (100 m) urban climate projections and climate sensitivity simulations for the city of Linz in Austria, based on high-resolution Urban Atlas land-use data and Copernicus topography data. The modelling methodology, as developed within CLARITY, are outlined and furthermore, the current and future climatic situation in terms of urban heat stress are analysed and possible climate adaptation measures, such as roof greening, increased albedo, decreased soil sealing, amongst others, are tested with respect to their efficiency towards resilient urban planning.