3.2.2.2 Urban Heat Islands and Land Use Effects
The modified land surface in cities affects the storage and radiative and turbulent transfers of heat and its partition into sensible and latent components (see Section 7.2 and Box 7.2). The relative warmth of a city compared with surrounding rural areas, known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect, arises from these changes and may also be affected by changes in water runoff, pollution and aerosols. Urban heat island effects are often very localised and depend on local climate factors such as windiness and cloudiness (which in turn depend on season), and on proximity to the sea. Section 3.3.2.4 discusses impacts of urbanisation on precipitation.
Many local studies have demonstrated that the microclimate within cities is on average warmer, with a smaller DTR, than if the city were not there. However, the key issue from a climate change standpoint is whether urban-affected temperature records have significantly biased large-scale temporal trends. Studies that have looked at hemispheric and global scales conclude that any urban-related trend is an order of magnitude smaller than decadal and longer time-scale trends evident in the series (e.g., Jones et al., 1990; Peterson et al., 1999). This result could partly be attributed to the omission from the gridded data set of a small number of sites (<1%) with clear urban-related warming trends. In a worldwide set of about 270 stations, Parker (2004, 2006) noted that warming trends in night minimum temperatures over the period 1950 to 2000 were not enhanced on calm nights, which would be the time most likely to be affected by urban warming. Thus, the global land warming trend discussed is very unlikely to be influenced significantly by increasing urbanisation (Parker, 2006). Over the conterminous USA, after adjustment for time-of-observation bias and other changes, rural station trends were almost indistinguishable from series including urban sites (Peterson, 2003; Figure 3.3, and similar considerations apply to China from 1951 to 2001 (Li et al., 2004). One possible reason for the patchiness of UHIs is the location of observing stations in parks where urban influences are reduced (Peterson, 2003). In summary, although some individual sites may be affected, including some small rural locations, the UHI effect is not pervasive, as all global-scale studies indicate it is a very small component of large-scale averages. Accordingly, this assessment adds the same level of urban warming uncertainty as in the TAR: 0.006°C per decade since 1900 for land, and 0.002°C per decade since 1900 for blended land with ocean, as ocean UHI is zero. These uncertainties are added to the cool side of the estimated temperatures and trends, as explained by Brohan et al. (2006), so that the error bars in Section 3.2.2.4, Figures 3.6 and 3.7 and FAQ 3.1, Figure 1 are slightly asymmetric. The statistical significances of the trends in Table 3.2 and Section 3.2.2.4, Table 3.3 take account of this asymmetry.
McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and De Laat and Maurellis (2006) attempted to demonstrate that geographical patterns of warming trends over land are strongly correlated with geographical patterns of industrial and socioeconomic development, implying that urbanisation and related land surface changes have caused much of the observed warming. However, the locations of greatest socioeconomic development are also those that have been most warmed by atmospheric circulation changes (Sections 3.2.2.7 and 3.6.4), which exhibit large-scale coherence. Hence, the correlation of warming with industrial and socioeconomic development ceases to be statistically significant. In addition, observed warming has been, and transient greenhouse-induced warming is expected to be, greater over land than over the oceans (Chapter 10), owing to the smaller thermal capacity of the land.
Comparing surface temperature estimates from the NRA with raw station time series, Kalnay and Cai (2003) concluded that more than half of the observed decrease in DTR in the eastern USA since 1950 was due to changes in land use, including urbanisation. This conclusion was based on the fact that the reanalysis did not explicitly include these factors, which would affect the observations. However, the reanalysis also did not explicitly include many other natural and anthropogenic effects, such as increasing greenhouse gases and observed changes in clouds or soil moisture (Trenberth, 2004). Vose et al. (2004) showed that the adjusted station data for the region (for homogeneity issues, see Appendix 3.B.2) do not support Kalnay and Cai’s conclusions. Nor are Kalnay and Cai’s results reproduced in the ERA-40 reanalysis (Simmons et al., 2004). Instead, most of the changes appear related to abrupt changes in the type of data assimilated into the reanalysis, rather than to gradual changes arising from land use and urbanisation changes. Current reanalyses may be reliable for estimating trends since 1979 (Simmons et al., 2004) but are in general unsuited for estimating longer-term global trends, as discussed in Appendix 3.B.5.
Nevertheless, changes in land use can be important for DTR at the local-to-regional scale. For instance, land degradation in northern Mexico resulted in an increase in DTR relative to locations across the border in the USA (Balling et al., 1998), and agriculture affects temperatures in the USA (Bonan, 2001; Christy et al., 2006). Desiccation of the Aral Sea since 1960 raised DTR locally (Small et al., 2001). By processing maximum and minimum temperature data as a function of day of the week, Forster and Solomon (2003) found a distinctive ‘weekend effect’ in DTR at stations examined in the USA, Japan, Mexico and China. The weekly cycle in DTR has a distinctive large-scale pattern with geographically varying sign, and strongly suggests an anthropogenic effect on climate, likely through changes in pollution and aerosols (Jin et al., 2005). Section 7.2 provides fuller discussion of the effects of land use changes.