Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
85
result(s) for
"Urban climatology Tropics."
Sort by:
Urbanization Enhanced Summertime Extreme Hourly Precipitation over the Yangtze River Delta
An extensive urban agglomeration has occurred over the Yangtze River delta (YRD) region of East China as a result of rapid urbanization since the middle 1990s. In this study, a 44-yr (i.e., 1975–2018) climatology of the summertime extreme hourly precipitation (EXHP; greater than the 90th percentile) over the YRD is analyzed, using historical land-use data, surface temperature, and hourly rain gauge observations, and then the relationship between rapid urbanization and EXHP changes is examined. Results show significant EXHP contrasts in diurnal variation and storm type roughly before and aftermiddle July. That is, tropical cyclones (TCs) account for 16.4% of the total EXHP hours, 80.5% of which occur during the late summer, whereas non-TC EXHP accounts for 94.7% and 66.2% during the early and late summer, respectively. Increasing trends in occurrence frequency and amount of the non-TC and TC-induced EXHP are detected over the urban agglomeration. Statistically significant larger increasing trends in both the EXHP and surface temperature are observed at urban stations than those at the nearby rural stations. An analysis of 113 locally developed non-TC extreme rainfall events during 2011–18 summers also suggests the contribution of the urban heat island effects to the more occurrences of EXHP, especially over a band-shaped urban region where several major cities are distributed. This study reveals a significant correlation between rapid urbanization and increased EXHP during the past two decades over the YRD region. The results have important implications for understanding the impact of urbanization on EXHP changes in a warming climate.
Journal Article
The global tree restoration potential
The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.
Journal Article
Can local fieldwork help to represent intra-urban variability of canopy parameters relevant for tropical African climate studies?
Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization in tropical Africa is increasingly leading to unprecedented socio-economical and environmental challenges in cities, particularly urban heat and climate change. The latter calls for a better representation of tropical African cities’ properties relevant for urban climate studies. Here, we demonstrate the possibility of collecting urban canopy parameters during a field campaign in the boreal summer months of 2018 for deriving a Local Climate Zone (LCZ) map and for improving the physical representation of climate-relevant urban morphological, thermal and radiative characteristics. The comparison of the resulting field-derived LCZ map with an existing map obtained from the World Urban Data and Access Portal Tool framework shows large differences. In particular, our map results in more vegetated open low-rise classes. In addition, site-specific fieldwork-derived urban characteristics are compared against the LCZ universal parameters. The latter shows that our fieldwork adds important information to the universal parameters by more specifically considering the presence of corrugated metal in the city of Kampala. This material is a typical roofing material found in densely built environments and informal settlements. It leads to lower thermal emissivity but higher thermal conductivity and capacity of buildings. To illustrate the importance of site-specific urban parameters, the newly derived site-specific urban characteristics are used as input fields to an urban parametrization scheme embedded in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM. This implementations decreases the surface temperature bias from 5.34 to 3.97 K. Based on our results, we recommend future research on tropical African cities to focus on a detailed representation of cities, with particular attention to impervious surface fraction and building materials.
Journal Article
Cooling island effect of urban lakes in hot waves under foehn and climate change
The central region of Vietnam has a tropical monsoon climate but often undergoes heat waves due to uncontrolled urbanization, foehn winds, and climate change. Water bodies are considered effective candidates for heat mitigation in cities through the water cooling island (WCI) effect. Quantifying the WCI capacity of water areas and related factors is necessary for sites with advantages of surface water. The current attempt used the WCI effect range (Lmax), temperature drop amplitude (ΔTmax), and temperature gradient (Gtemp) to investigate the cooling effect of 20 lakes in the Thanh Noi region, Hue City. Data derived from high-resolution Google Earth, Landsat-8 Satellite Imagery Data, and ground truth. The results show that the average water temperature of the 20 studied lakes was about 36.61 °C, lower than the average temperature in the area with an urban heat island (UHI) of about 2.82 °C. The mean Lmax was 150 m, ΔTmax was 1.52 °C, and Gtemp was 10.16 °C /km or 0.01 °C/m. Climate characteristics and human impacts had reduced the ability of the lakes to create WCI during the period when the lake water level was low. The factors that influenced the WCI significantly were the landscape shape index (LSI), the proportion of green (PG), and the percentage of impervious surfaces (PI). Most lakes with relatively simple LSI, high PG, and low PI obtained high WCI, suggesting that structural and landscape characteristics played a critical role in urban cooling.
Journal Article
Sensitivity of Canopy Phenology to Local Urban Environmental Characteristics in a Tropical City
Canopy phenology is sensitive to variability in local environmental settings. In temperate climates, urban phenological processes and their determinants are relatively well understood. Equivalent understanding of processes in tropical urban settings is, however, less resolved. In this paper, we explore the influence of local urban environmental characteristics (that is, degree of urbanization, land cover and urban climate) on canopy phenology of two deciduous tree species (Jacaranda mimosifolia, n = 48, and Tabebuia rosea, n = 24) in a tropical city (Kampala, Uganda). Our study design involved ground monitoring and field sampling in 2017, with a focus on the dry season. We found that both species experienced significantly higher rates of canopy cover decline in heavily built-up neighborhoods (p < 0.05 for both species). Moreover, Jacaranda was more sensitive to differences in the degree of urbanization than Tabebuia, both in terms of total percentage tree canopy cover (p < 0.01) and net leaf loss (p < 0.05). Total percentage tree canopy cover for Jacaranda declined with increasing proportion of impervious cover (that is, roads and paved cover) and was positively related to relative humidity (p < 0.01), a variable correlated with soil moisture. Net leaf loss in Jacaranda increased with the decreasing proportion of pervious land cover and as nighttime air temperature increased (p < 0.01). In contrast, land cover and urban climate had no significant influence on either measure of phenological traits for Tabebuia. These results provide new evidence of the effect of urbanization on canopy phenology of different tree species in the tropics. Such knowledge offers new insights into the spatial and temporal differences in the physiological functional traits of trees and also serves as a proxy for possible species responses under future climate change.
Journal Article
Assessing the potential of heat stress mitigation in asymmetrical street conditions of Bhopal city
In Indian cities, where streets are the only affordable public space, thermal-climatic conditions have a significant impact on pedestrian activity and comfort. However, narratives are insufficient on pedestrian risk assessment in asymmetrical urban settings. Therefore, current study investigates the potential of thermal stress mitigation in the context of human biometeorological assessment in asymmetrical urban settings of Bhopal city. It initiates with the selection of a commercial street in tropical climate of Bhopal (Koppen climatic classification, Aw) with the measurement of its metrological and morphological attributes. Furthermore, it leads to an assessment of thermal stress utilizing physical survey and Envi-met simulations including the identification of critical spots. Finally, development of iterated scenario considering one major and local street with five varied street sections in symmetrical/asymmetrical condition for the EW, NWSE and NS orientation. The efficiency of mitigation measures in cooling the outdoor stress area was analysed by using Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) along with mean radiant temperature (MRT) from a spatiotemporal perspective. The highest stress reduction was observed in higher asymmetrical section while lowest was recorded by lower symmetrical section. However, it is recommended to integrate high asymmetrical sections in complex urban area which can provide a better reduction (average UTCI by 3 °C, average MRT by 7 °C) to outdoor stress due to their ability of regulating efficient wind flow and shielding radiation. The evidence-based selection of street orientation and openness can adopt to optimize the urban configuration in similar climates to improve streetscape and activities from an environmental quality perspective.
Journal Article
Is the urban heat island exacerbated during heatwaves in southern Australian cities?
The extra-tropical Australian cities of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth are all affected by summer heatwaves and the urban heat island (UHI) effect. While research has been undertaken on both phenomena individually, they have not been studied in tandem in Australia. This research investigates the relationship between warm season heatwaves (November to March) and the UHI from January 1995 to March 2014. Observational temperature data from six or seven Bureau of Meteorology Automatic Weather Stations in each of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth are used to determine the strength of the UHI during heatwave periods and these are compared to non-heatwave periods. Melbourne and Adelaide both experience an exacerbated (warmer than normal) UHI at night during heatwaves. The night-time UHI in Perth is diminished (cooler than normal) during heatwaves and often changes to an urban cool island (UCI), when compared to non-heatwave periods. Environmental factors that might affect the strength of the UHI are investigated, including wind speed and direction, and station location. Despite the proximity of all stations to the coast, coastal influences on UHI strength are minimal during heatwave conditions. Station choice is found to not affect our results, with the characteristic pattern of the UHI during heatwaves remaining consistent across all three cities in a leave-one-out sensitivity analysis.
Journal Article
Land cover affects microclimate and temperature suitability for arbovirus transmission in an urban landscape
The emergence of mosquito-transmitted viruses poses a global threat to human health. Combining mechanistic epidemiological models based on temperature-trait relationships with climatological data is a powerful technique for environmental risk assessment. However, a limitation of this approach is that the local microclimates experienced by mosquitoes can differ substantially from macroclimate measurements, particularly in heterogeneous urban environments. To address this scaling mismatch, we modeled spatial variation in microclimate temperatures and the thermal potential for dengue transmission by Aedes albopictus across an urban-to-rural gradient in Athens-Clarke County GA. Microclimate data were collected across gradients of tree cover and impervious surface cover. We developed statistical models to predict daily minimum and maximum microclimate temperatures using coarse-resolution gridded macroclimate data (4000 m) and high-resolution land cover data (30 m). The resulting high-resolution microclimate maps were integrated with temperature-dependent mosquito abundance and vectorial capacity models to generate monthly predictions for the summer and early fall of 2018. The highest vectorial capacities were predicted for patches of trees in urban areas with high cover of impervious surfaces. Vectorial capacity was most sensitive to tree cover during the summer and became more sensitive to impervious surfaces in the early fall. Predictions from the same models using temperature data from a local meteorological station consistently over-predicted vectorial capacity compared to the microclimate-based estimates. This work demonstrates that it is feasible to model variation in mosquito microenvironments across an urban-to-rural gradient using satellite Earth observations. Epidemiological models applied to the microclimate maps revealed localized patterns of temperature suitability for disease transmission that would not be detectable using macroclimate data. Incorporating microclimate data into disease transmission models has the potential to yield more spatially precise and ecologically interpretable metrics of mosquito-borne disease transmission risk in urban landscapes.
Journal Article
Unexpected large-scale atmospheric response to urbanization in East China
Urban land use in East China has undergone considerable change since the 1990s. How such change affects both in situ and remote climate conditions is investigated through numerical modelling experiments with the Community Atmosphere Model Version 5.1. The results show that urbanization causes an increase in surface temperature due to reduced surface albedo but a decrease in specific humidity due to locally reduced surface evaporation. The change in specific humidity overwhelms the surface temperature change effect, leading to locally reduced precipitation. It is noted that urbanization causes changes in climate conditions not only locally but also remotely. Anomalous low-level divergence associated with the reduced precipitation in situ prevents the northward progression of the East Asian summer monsoon. As a result, the major monsoon rain band is strengthened and confined over South China and the tropical Asian monsoon zone along 12°–25°N. The increase of rainfall in the tropical zone, on one hand, induces the local overturning cell, leading to anomalous subsidence over mid-latitude Asia and the equatorial zone, and, on the other hand, perturbs the Subtropical Jet, generating a Rossby wave train disseminating along the Jet. Both of these processes cause anomalous dry and hot conditions over mid-latitude Asia.
Journal Article