Fei Chen is Associate Head and Professor in the Division of Environment and Sustainability at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An internationally recognized atmospheric scientist, he previously spent over 26 years at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he led major community efforts in land–surface, hydrology, and coupled weather and regional climate modeling. He led developing widely-used modeling systems including Noah/Noah-MP, HRLDAS, and the integrated WRF-Urban model, now adopted by operational centers and research institutions worldwide. His research has advanced understanding of land–atmosphere interactions, urban boundary-layer and extreme precipitation processes. He is Co-Chair of the WMO-WWRP Urban-Predict Project and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Urban Climate. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union and received the AMS Helmut Landsberg Award and International Association for Urban Climate Luke Howard Award for pioneering contributions to urban climate modeling.
Rapid urbanization is reshaping land–atmosphere interactions and intensifying the impacts of extreme weather and climate hazards, including heat waves, heavy rainfall, flooding, and air-quality extremes. Improving the prediction and warning of these high-impact urban events requires integrated modeling frameworks that connect physical process understanding, numerical prediction systems, and decision-relevant information. This lecture reviews recent advances in integrated urban modeling, focusing on challenges in developing urban canopy and hydrology models and coupling them with convection-permitting and variable-resolution global models, particularly challenges in predicting extreme weather in tropical coastal megacities in Southeast Asia. We discuss how explicit representation of urban morphology, surface energetics, and anthropogenic emissions influences boundary-layer evolution, urban heat stress, and extreme precipitation.
The lecture also highlights the vision and ongoing activities of the WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) Urban-PREDICT initiative, which seeks to advance urban-scale prediction and early warning through coordinated modeling, observations, integration of physical and social sciences, AI methods, and international collaboration. We will discuss key challenges and opportunities in translating forecasts into actionable urban warnings to support more resilient and climate-ready cities.