Abstract
The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, located over East China, is an international urban agglomeration radiating Asia Pacific with convenient transportation, advanced manufacturing industry, and modern service industry. The intensive human activities have exerted substantial effects on the weather and climate over the YRD region during the past decades, thus bringing more challenges to accurate weather and climate forecasting. However, the weekly cycles of surface air temperature and precipitation linked closely to human activities and their corresponding physical processes remain insufficiently understood. Here, we investigate the weekly cycles of summertime surface air temperature and precipitation and the weekend effect over the YRD region for the period of 2008–2019 using high-resolution observational data and reanalysis data. The results demonstrate that lower surface air temperature and higher precipitation generally manifest during weekends compared to weekdays over the YRD region particularly over the areas with intensive human activities. Further analysis of the underlying physical processes points to the aerosol-cloud-radiation interaction which largely explains the weekend effect in summertime temperature and precipitation over the YRD region.
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Data availability
The hourly high-resolution precipitation data is available at http://data.cma.cn/site/showSubject/id/101.html. The historical typhoon data is stored at https://tcdata.typhoon.org.cn/dlrdqx_zl.html. The gridded population data is available at https://doi.org/10.12078/2017121101. GTOPO30 topographical height data is stored at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7DF6PQS, and DMSP-OLS nighttime lights time data is from https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html. The hourly ERA5 reanalysis variables of low cloud cover, medium cloud cover, high cloud cover, 2-m temperature, vertically integrated moisture divergence, surface downward short-wave radiation flux, surface net short-wave radiation flux, surface net long-wave radiation flux, surface winds, and 850-hPa wind flows are available at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47 and https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.bd0915c6 respectively. The three-hourly aerosol optical depth product at 550 nm of the EAC4 reanalysis dataset is stored at https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-reanalysis-eac4?tab=overview.
Code availability
All the figures were produced using NCL. The code used in this study will be available on reasonable request.
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This work was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0603601, 2018YFA0606501) and the National Key Scientific and Technological Infrastructure project “Earth System Science Numerical Simulator Facility” (EarthLab).
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Jingyong Zhang and Ziyi Song conceived the study. Ziyi Song performed the data analysis and prepared the first draft. Ziyi Song and Jingyong Zhang revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper.
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Song, Z., Zhang, J. Weekend effect in summertime temperature and precipitation over the Yangtze River Delta region. Theor Appl Climatol 150, 379–388 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04173-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04173-7