Abstract
This study has two main purposes; the first is to clarify urban warming in Taipei City based on 28 years of climatological data, and the second is to characterize the urban heat island (UHI) mechanism in a tropical basin using the available relevant climatological data collected from Taipei City and neighboring areas (Taipei County).
Taipei City has urbanized rapidly since 1967, and urban warming appeared from 1985. The effects of urbanization on local weather and climate change resulted in a remarkable increase in mean and minimum temperatures. However, urbanization resulted in little change in maximum temperature in Taipei City. The increase in minimum temperature in summer is significantly large in Taipei City.
The results of field observations in 2008–2009 proved that the nocturnal UHI phenomenon is predominant; however, in the rainy season (November and December), the UHI intensity during the daytime is higher than at night. The maximum UHI intensity reached 4.0–5.0°C during clear day-sky and calm wind conditions, mainly in the wet winter. In addition, during the dry months (spring), the nocturnal UHI reached its greatest intensity on cloudless nights before sunrise, and the maximum UHI intensity reached about 2.0°C.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank all students in the Surface-Atmosphere Interactions Laboratory, Taiwan University, for developing the thermal-recorder-observation system and downloading data. This research was partially supported by RIHN Project 2-4 Human Impacts on Urban Subsurface Environments. The work described in this report was funded by a grant for “geographical study” from FUKUTAKE Science & Culture Foundation.
The authors are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on this paper.
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Bai, Y., Juang, JY., Kondoh, A. (2011). Urban Warming and Urban Heat Islands in Taipei, Taiwan. In: Taniguchi, M. (eds) Groundwater and Subsurface Environments. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53904-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53904-9_12
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