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While big cities face the unpleasant reality of droughts and other forms of extreme weather in the future, what if there was a way to control rainfall, temperatures and more by the way we shape our towns?

A new study, published in Boundary-Layer Meteorology, has concluded that the shapes of our cities can have a major effect on the weather that occurs in and around them. It's more than the "urban heat island" effect – cities can impact wind speeds and directions, affecting everything from the ground level up into the atmosphere, the study also revealed.

Through a series of detailed simulations, the scientists who performed the study found the local weather of Basel, Switzerland, was quite different in some parts of the city. The reason for these differences, in part, were due to the layout of the city's buildings.

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"Most city representations used in weather models are based on data obtained from tower measurements made at a particular location within the city, which current models approximate as a rough patch of land," study author Marco Giometto said in the press release. "The transport of heat, humidity, or pollutants is then computed using mathematical relationships. These relationships implicitly assume that the city is geometrically regular, which is a stringent assumption."

The findings could be a breakthrough in developing weather models that take cities into account for what they are – a piece of the weather machine. Some models, the study's authors said, do little to account for cities, but a basic understanding of how these cities are laid out could go a long way. It'll never be perfect, as cities are always changing and expanding, but it's a start.

"Weather models obviously can't include detailed representations of all large cities," Giometto said.

Basel was not the first city studied for its effect on weather. Previous urban heat island studies showed Atlanta averages a higher number of storms than surrounding areas, FastCoDesign noted.

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