To deepen our understanding of the urban climate and to address the societal issues in cities, climate modeling with detailed urban representation (e.g. building morphology, anthropogenic heating) is vital. Typically, these investigations are on neighborhood or regional scales of cities. Hence, global datasets of anthropogenic heat emissions (AHE), which corresponds to the added energy from the surface due to human use of energy, are becoming available at high spatial resolutions (e.g. 1-km). 

Meanwhile, global-scale models, ranging from general circulation models to earth system models, are rapidly advancing computationally (i.e. improved efficiency at high spatial resolutions) but with main emphasis on the global climate change. Furthermore, applications of high-resolution global climate models are still lacking. This project aims to bridge the gap by modeling and investigating the spatio-temporal effects of detailed anthropogenic heat emission (AHE) at a global scale using a 14-km spatial resolving general circulation model (GCM).

The findings will provide insight to the spatio-temporal extent of impacts of cities to global climate, in addition to the widely known greenhouse gas effect.