eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

8.2 Improvements and recommendations for future work
The work in this PhD study, and in particular the scenarios for past and future urbanisation
presented in Chapters 6 and 7, has been limited by the computational demand of the
METRAS+BEP model and the resources available at the University of Birmingham. A
valuable recommendation for future work would be to devise a faster implementation of the
urban module within METRAS and the use of the parallelised version of the model
METRAS. Longer simulations would allow a better assessment of the urban effects of
climate, for example following some of the methods in Lamptey et al. (2005) and Trusilova
et al. (2008) to do a statistical analysis of the effects of the urban surface.
Due to the computational demand of the modelling system, the scope of the analysis has
been strictly limited to near surface impacts on temperature and wind speed in and around
the urban area. Future work could extend this scope, for example considering the effects of
the urbanisation land cover change on the boundary layer structure, surface energy balance.
An extension of the model to include air chemistry would permit the model meteorological
results to be linked to air quality studies in the urban area.
This PhD study has focussed on the simulation of cloud and rain free days in order to
reduce complexity and computational demand. The inclusion of these subroutines could
permit an investigation into the effects of the urban area on precipitation. Numerical studies
of this sort have been undertaken for many urban areas (Thielen et al. 2000; e.g. Trusilova
2006; Lin et al. 2008) and some experimental studies have observed that the London urban
heat island can trigger storms (Atkinson 1968; Hand et al. 2004).
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