Disentangling the trend in the warming of urban areas into global and local factors
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Published version
Date
2021-11
Authors
Estrada, Francisco
Perron, Pierre
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
F. Estrada, P. Perron. 2021. "Disentangling the trend in the warming of urban areas into global and local factors.." Ann N Y Acad Sci, Volume 1504, Issue 1, pp. 230 - 246. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14691
Abstract
Large cities account for a significant share of national population and wealth, and exert high pressure on local and regional resources, exacerbating socioenvironmental risks. The replacement of natural landscapes with higher heat capacity materials because of urbanization and anthropogenic waste heat are some of the factors contributing to local climate change caused by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Because of synergistic effects, local climate change can exacerbate the impacts of global warming in cities. Disentangling the contributions to warming in cities from global and local drivers can help to understand their relative importance and guide local adaptation policies. The canopy UHI intensity is commonly approximated by the difference between temperatures within cities and the surrounding areas. We present a complementary approach that applies the concept of common trends to extract the global contributions to observed warming in cities and to obtain a residual warming trend caused by local and regional factors. Once the effects of global drivers are removed, common features appear in cities' temperatures in the eastern part of the United States. Most cities experienced higher warming than that attributable to global climate change, and some shared a period of rapid warming during urban sprawl in the mid-20th century in the United States.
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License
© 2021 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.