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Anthropogenic heat (AH) is an important part of urban surface energy balance. Although AH affects regional climates through changing land-atmosphere interactions, the climate forcing from AH are not usually calculated in state-of-the-art regional climate simulations. In this paper, the spatial pattern of AH in 20 automatic weather station sites in the Beijing municipal administrative area is parameterized by employing nighttime light data. Two experiments were designed and performed to quantify the influence of AH on the surface balance of energy and water through running the Integrated urban Land Model (IUM). The results show that due to accounting for AH, the simulated LST increases; the net radiation decreases around noon; the absolute value of the ground heat flux increases around noon; the sensible heat flux increases in the daytime; the evapotranspiration decreases around noon and increases in the morning and evening; volumetric soil moisture and soil water storage decrease; aggregated evapotranspiration increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]