Urbanization turns rural land cover into artificial land cover, while due to human activities, it introduces a great quantity of emissions. We attempt to quantify the impact of urbanization on the final air pollutant levels by looking not only at these emissions, but also the way urban land cover influences meteorological conditions, how the removal of pollutants changes due to urban land cover, and how biogenic emissions from vegetation change due to less vegetation in urban areas.

Snow plays a major role in the regulation of the Earth's surface temperature. Together with climate change, rising temperatures are already altering snow in many ways. In this context, it is crucial to better understand the ability of climate models to represent snow and snow processes. This work focuses on Europe and shows that the melting season in spring still represents a challenge for climate models and that more work is needed to accurately simulate snow–atmosphere interactions.

This review of air quality research focuses on developments over the past decade. The article considers current and future challenges that are important from air quality research and policy perspectives and highlights emerging prominent gaps of knowledge. The review also examines how air pollution management needs to adapt to new challenges and makes recommendations to guide the direction for future air quality research within the wider community and to provide support for policy.

Three new datasets of global emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) emitted into the atmosphere from terrestrial vegetation were developed for air quality modelling using the Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature (MEGANv2.1) driven by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts meteorological reanalyses for the years 2000–2019. The datasets include updates of the isoprene emission factors in Europe and study the impact of land cover change on emissions.

Urban areas are strong hot spots of emissions influencing local and regional air quality. Cities furthermore influence the meteorological conditions due to their characteristic surface properties and geometry. We found that if these latter effects are not included in the quantification of the impact of urban emissions on regional air quality, this impact will be overestimated, and this overestimation is mainly due to the enhanced turbulence that is present in cities compared to rural areas.

We describe validation of the PALM model v6.0 against measurements collected during two observational campaigns in Dejvice, Prague. The study focuses on the evaluation of the newly developed or improved radiative and energy balance modules in PALM related to urban modelling. In addition to the energy-related quantities, it also evaluates air flow and air quality under street canyon conditions.

Cities are characterized by their impact on various meteorological variables. Our study aims to generalize these modifications into a single phenomenon – the urban meteorology island (UMI). A wide ensemble of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and Regional Climate Model (RegCM) simulations investigated urban-induced modifications as individual UMI components. Significant changes are found in most of the discussed meteorological variables with a strong impact of specific model simulations.

The paper shows how extreme meteorological conditions change due to the urban land-cover forcing and how this translates to the impact on the extreme air pollution over central European cities. It focuses on ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 μm and shows that, while for the extreme daily maximum 8 h ozone, changes are same as for the mean ones, much larger modifications are calculated for extreme NO₂ and PM_2.5 compared to their mean changes.

Urban surfaces alter meteorological conditions which consequently alter air pollution due to modified transport and chemical reactions. Here, we focus on a major component of this influence, enhanced vertical eddy diffusion. Using a regional climate model coupled to a chemistry transport model, we investigate how different representations of turbulent transport translate to urban canopy impact on ozone and PM_2.5 concentrations and whether turbulence remains the most important component.

The impact of meteorological changes introduced by urbanization on aerosol concentration using a regional climate model and a chemistry transport model over central Europe is investigated. We found a strong increase of temperature and turbulence and a decrease of humidity and wind speed due to urban surfaces. This resulted in a clear decrease of aerosol concentrations near the surface: PM_2.5 concentrations were reduced by 3 μg/m³. The dominating effect is the increased turbulent transport.

Our work presents a comparison of modelled and observed urban-induced meteorological changes in long-term perspective using 10-year simulations. It contains an evaluation of models' urban parameterizations, investigations of the benefits of more sophisticated urban parameterizations with respect to simple approaches and evaluation of urban-induced meteorological changes from the perspective of pollutant dispersion.

We revise selected findings regarding utilization of Global Positioning System radio occultation density profiles for analysis of internal gravity waves. The results show that previously published results are valid only for one specific data version only. Using radiosonde profiles, we also analyze a nonhydrostatic component in temperature profiles. The last part presents detailed study on the utilization of density profiles for characterization of the wave field stability.

Using an online coupled system of a regional climate model and chemistry transport model we investigated the radiative/climate impact of short-lived pollutants directly emitted by urban areas and those secondarily formed, focusing on the area of central Europe. We found that the direct/indirect effects of aerosols dominate, causing small but statistically significant cooling in summer and winter (up to −0.04 K). The radiative impact of ozone changes remains negligible.

The study is dealing with the present day air quality impacts of the urban emissions, focusing on central Europe. Using a coupled regional climate/chemistry model we showed that urban centers impact largely (by up to 10–20 %) the regional air quality but the urban air quality itself is affected by local emission by only 50 % and the rural (non-urban) emissions and long-range transport play an important role in urban air pollution. This has to be taken into account in air quality control measures.

The impact of cities and urban surfaces on climate of central Europe is examined using a regional climate model coupled to a single-layer urban canopy model. Results show a significant impact on temperature (up to 1.5K increase in summer), the boundary layer height, surface wind with a winter decrease and precipitation (a summer decrease). Applying the urban canopy model, the regional climate model exhibits a decreased model bias when compared to observations.