Abstract An urban canopy parameterization (UCP) is implemented into the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesoscale Model (MM5) to improve meteorological fields in the urban boundary layer for finescale (∼1-km horizontal grid spacing) simulations. The UCP uses the drag-force approach for dynamics and a simple treatment of the urban thermodynamics to account for the effects of the urban environment. The UCP is evaluated using a real-data application for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The simulations show that the UCP produces profiles of wind speed, friction velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and potential temperature that are more consistent with the observations taken in urban areas and data from idealized wind tunnel studies of urban areas than do simulations that use the roughness approach. In addition, comparisons with meteorological measurements show that the UCP simulations are superior to those that use the roughness approach. This improvement of the treatment of the urban areas in the meteorological model could have implications for simulating air chemistry processes at this scale.