DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10077795
title: Ultra-high-resolution WRF input data, including Local Climate Zones, for highly-resolved urban-scale modeling in Greece

description: The HEAT-ALARM Urban Morphology and Environment Database (UMED) provides ultra-high-resolution data that characterize the landscape, form and function of the five highest populated cities in Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki, Larissa, Patras, Heraklion) for integration in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, versions 4.3-4.4.1 (Skamarock et al., 2021), in order to enable the highly-resolved numerical weather prediction (NWP) over the targeted urban areas as part of the weather forecasting component of the project's heat-health warning system (HHWS). These data include: (a) terrain elevation based on the 3-arc-sec (~ 90 m) horizontal grid resolution SRTM (shuttle radar topography mission) data, version 4.1 (Jarvis et al., 2008), (b) land use/land cover (LU/LC) at 100 m spatial resolution, constructed by combining CORINE land cover data (CLC – Feranec et al., 2016) and Local Climate Zone (LCZ – Stewart and Oke, 2012) classification, and (c) city-specific surface and urban canopy properties (e.g., width of streets, albedo of roofs) for each LCZ class, assigned in look-up tables (URBPARM_LCZ.TBL). Along with UMED, the GEOGRID.TBL.ARW_HEAT-ALARM is provided for assisting the WRF implementation with the above data.

Considering that such finely detailed data have been incorporated in modeling studies only in Athens so far (e.g. Giannaros et al., 2014; Agathangelidis et al., 2019; Giannaros et al., 2018, 2023), the development and distribution of UMED in the framework of HEAT-ALARM constitutes an important step towards the creation of an open-access national urban dataset in Greece that can be used for accurately describing and modeling the urban environments under various applications.

More information on the data generation and their use within the WRF-urban modeling framework can be found at: https://osf.io/p2qrd. 

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