Investigation of the impact of anthropogenic heat flux within an Urban Land Surface model and PILPS-urban

10 Results from the first international urban model comparison experiment (PILPS-Urban) suggested that models which 11 neglected the anthropogenic heat flux within the surface energy balance performed at least as well as models that 12 include the source term, but this could not be explained. The analyses undertaken show that the results from PILPS13 Urban were masked by the signal from including vegetation, which was identified in PILPS-Urban as being important. 14 Including the anthropogenic heat flux does give improved performance, but the benefit is small for the site studied 15 given the relatively small magnitude of this flux relative to other terms in the surface energy balance. However, there is 16 no further benefit from including temporal variations in the flux at this site. The importance is expected to increase at 17 sites with a larger anthropogenic heat flux and greater temporal variations. 18 19