Learning Urban Climate Dynamics via Physics-Guided Urban Surface–Atmosphere Interactions
Jiyang Xia, Fenghua Ling, Zhenhui Jessie Li, Junjie Yu, Hongliang Zhang, David Topping, LEI BAI, Zhonghua Zheng
Urban warming differs markedly from regional background trends, highlighting the unique behavior of urban climates and the challenges they present. Accurately predicting local urban climate necessitates modeling the interactions between urban surfaces and atmospheric forcing. Although off-the-shelf machine learning (ML) algorithms offer considerable accuracy for climate prediction, they often function as black boxes, learning data mappings rather than capturing physical evolution. As a result, they struggle to capture key land-atmosphere interactions and may produce physically inconsistent predictions. To address these limitations, we propose UCformer, a novel multi-task, physics-guided Transformer architecture designed to emulate nonlinear urban climate processes. UCformer jointly estimates 2-m air temperature $\(T\)$, specific humidity $\(q\)$, and dew point temperature $\(t\)$ in urban areas, while embedding domain and physical priors into its learning structure. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating domain and physical knowledge leads to significant improvements in emulation accuracy and generalizability under future urban climate scenarios. Further analysis reveals that learning shared correlations across cities enables the model to capture transferable urban surface–atmosphere interaction patterns, resulting in improved accuracy in urban climate emulation. Finally, UCformer shows strong potential to fit real-world data: when fine-tuned with limited observational data, it achieves competitive performance in estimating urban heat fluxes compared to a physics-based model.