Revisiting the Convective Like Boundary Layer Assumption in the Urban Option of AERMOD

Abstract

Urban areas and their surroundings feature unique, horizontally inhomogeneous spatial distributions of land use and land cover, leading to urban heat islands (UHIs) for both air and land surface temperature that complicate the estimation of urban sensible heat flux. The urban dispersion option in AERMOD, the American Meteorological Society (AMS)/Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regulatory Model, incorporates this effect at night through a “convective like boundary layer” that modifies the single column meteorology based on a population number representative of the urban area. The model produces positive nighttime sensible heat flux values that often significantly overestimate observed values from the literature. This study re-examines the formulation of the AERMOD urban option assumptions, methodology, and original evaluation against a field study of a power plant in Indianapolis. We investigate replacing the population-based parameterizations of urban–surrounding temperature differences (ΔT) with observations of remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST) data from the Advanced Baseline Imager on the GOES-16/R/East geostationary satellite. We generated a monthly averaged, hourly, wind direction-dependent, clear sky land surface urban heat island ΔT database for 480 continental United States (CONUS) urban areas, as defined by the 2010 US Census. These ΔT values are used to advise city-specific horizontal advection corrections to sensible heat flux estimates that are neglected from simple energy balance models. The four cities of Cleveland, Amarillo, Atlanta, and Baltimore are highlighted, showing that the AERMOD predicted nighttime ΔT values are 794%, 416%, 1048%, and 758% higher, respectively, than the GOES-16 observations. These overestimated ΔT values in AERMOD lead to nighttime sensible heat flux values > 100 W/m2 that rival daytime values. However, using the GOES-16 observations as horizontal advection corrections to sensible heat flux results in trends that match the expected neutral to slightly positive nighttime values from observations recorded in the literature. The annual nighttime average in 2021 was −0.8 W/m2, 8.6 W/m2, 3.0 W/m2, and 3.1 W/m2 in Cleveland, Amarillo, Atlanta, and Baltimore, respectively, using this approach. Finally, reviewing the initial evaluation with the Indianapolis database against independent studies from the literature suggest that the AERMOD urban option inadvertently implements an urban heat island modeling approach to account for what was a low-level jet during the field study.