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Influence of the urban spatial layout of central Beijing on the atmospheric humidity field

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Abstract

Based on the meteorological data (2009–2018) acquired by high-density automatic meteorological stations in the central urban area (CUA) of Beijing, this study adopted an urban-rural ratio method to construct a qr to quantify the impact of urbanization on the spatial and temporal distribution of specific humidity (q). And the urban morphological parameters such as building height (BH), building density (BD), floor area ratio (FAR), sky view factor (SVF), and land surface parameters including vegetation coverage (VC) and impervious coverage (IC) with 500-m spatial resolution in CUA were calculated, and furthermore, the relationships between the six spatial layout parameters and another indicator, urban heat island (UHI) intensity, and qr were studied. The results show that q of CUA is 81~114% of that of the suburbs, and the urban dry island (UDI) effect and urban wet island (UWI) effect coexist throughout the year. The maximum UDI occurs during autumn daytime and the maximum UWI appears at night in winter. The UDI effect is prone to occur in areas with VC < 11%, IC >85%, BH > 15 m, and BD > 24%, while the UWI effect is more likely to appear in areas with VC > 35% and FAR < 0.3. The contributions of the six urbanization parameters to the spatial change of qr in different time periods are 6.2 to 33.5%, and VC is the largest (33.5%), followed by BD (31.9%) and SVF (29.9%), and the main factor affecting the annual average qr is BD with the contribution of 18.9%. Compared with the urbanization parameters, the UHI is more important and the contribution to the change of q can be up to 35.7%. The results show that these spatial layout parameters are not sufficient to explain the main change in q, and more other parameters need to be considered.

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Our data and codes support the findings of this study and can be obtained from the corresponding author if necessary.

Funding

This research is sponsored by the Beijing Natural Science Fund (8192020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China

    Yonghong Liu & Fuzhong Weng

  2. School of Remote Sensing and Geomatics Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 21004, China

    Yongming Xu

  3. National Satellite Meteorological Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xiuzhen Han

  4. Beijing Municipal Climate Center, Beijing, 100089, China

    Wenjun Shu

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  1. Yonghong Liu
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Contributions

1. Liu Yonghong: writing—original draft; data curation

2. Xu Yongming: spatial morphological parameter extraction

3. Han Xiuzhen: main research ideas and article structure organization

4. Shu Wenjun: meteorogical data calculation

5. Weng Fuzhong: manuscript revision and important suggestions

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Correspondence to Xiuzhen Han.

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Liu, Y., Xu, Y., Han, X. et al. Influence of the urban spatial layout of central Beijing on the atmospheric humidity field. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 455–471 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03621-0

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