Vol. 124, No. 2 * Pages 143–309 * April - June 2020

Urbanized areas modify the local climate due to the physical properties and morphology of surface objects. The urban impacts on local scale interact with the regional climate resulting in an amplification of certain climate aspects in the cities (e.g., higher maximum air temperature), which may be further enhanced with climate change. Regional climate models provide adequate tool for assessing the regional characteristics of global changes, however, they are incapable for describing the local impacts, e.g., in cities, due to their relatively low resolution (usually 10–25 km horizontally) and due to the lack of detailed description of relevant physical processes. To investigate the future climate change in cities, surface models provide a scientifically sound and cutting-edge solution for the previous problem. In this study, the behavior of SURFEX externalized land surface model including the TEB urban canopy scheme and coupled to the ALADIN-Climate regional climate model in offline mode is investigated. A 10-year-long simulation for 2001–2010 was achieved on 1 km resolution for Budapest. The main goals of our investigation are i) to assess how the biases of the regional climate model inherited and modified by SURFEX, ii) what is the added value of SURFEX to ALADIN-Climate, and iii) what are the capabilities of SURFEX in terms of describing urban and suburban seasonal temperature cycle and daily urban heat island (UHI) evolution in Budapest. Quantified validation is conducted using the measurements of two stations located in the city center and in the suburban area. It was found that SURFEX overestimates the 2 m temperature in both locations throughout the year, in spite of the too cold ALADIN forcings. The strength of nocturnal UHI is overestimated from autumn till spring, while it is slightly too weak in summer. Moreover, the evolution and collapse of daily UHI is imperfectly simulated, namely some delay and slower daily dynamics occur, which might be caused by the method applied for deriving the atmospheric forcings.