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eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

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types, building heights, and different amounts <strong>of</strong> vegetation coverage, it is possible to consider<br />

how urban planners can design cities which maximise comfort and sustainable energy use. There<br />

are also important links between this work and climate change, since London could be<br />

particularly vulnerable to future changes in its climate, such as increased flooding events and<br />

exacerbated summer heat waves.<br />

1.2 Structure <strong>of</strong> this thesis<br />

A review <strong>of</strong> the current literature is presented in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 describes the mesoscale<br />

model METRAS which is used for this study, the urban scheme BEP chosen to be implemented<br />

in the model, as well as the methods used in the implementation and the data sources required to<br />

configure the modelling system for the London domain and to evaluate the model.<br />

The results from the implementation <strong>of</strong> the urban scheme in METRAS are presented in Chapter<br />

4. The model is initially run for an idealised domain, and sensitivity tests are carried out to enable<br />

a full understanding <strong>of</strong> the model performance and the underlying processes which determine the<br />

urban impact on the model results. The model is then run for London, and the results are<br />

evaluated against meteorological data from London weather stations (Chapter 5).<br />

In Chapter 6 the effects <strong>of</strong> past urbanisation scenarios are investigated for a particular<br />

meteorological case for which the model was evaluated and for which a significant urban effect<br />

was identified. The effects <strong>of</strong> urbanisation on the regional climate are isolated from other effects<br />

by comparing simulations performed with a land cover map representing urban land use in 2000<br />

and hypothetical land cover maps based on a literature survey.<br />

6

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