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Urban warming in the 2013 summer heat wave in eastern China

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Abstract

The impact of urban warming during the 2013 July–August extreme heat wave event across the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in China was assessed. Using a newly developed high-resolution, land-use dataset, urban stations were identified from a total of 101 stations in the YRD. The difference between urban and non-urban/rural stations indicates that urban warming reached 1.22 °C in the 2013 summer heat wave. The new land-use dataset was then input to the Weather Research and Forecasting model to further understand the dynamical/physical processes of the urban warming during the heat wave. The model-simulated urban warming is ~1.5 °C. Impacts of urbanization on near-surface temperature had strong diurnal variation, reaching a peak at 19:00 LST, around sunset. In the daytime, urban warming was mainly caused by enhanced sensible heat fluxes and longwave radiation from the surface. Because of reduced latent heat flux and increased heat capacity, urban ground stored much more heat than rural ground during the daytime, which is later released as sensible heat flux from the surface at night, leading to the nocturnal urban warming. The simulation results also suggest a positive feedback between urban warming and heat wave intensity, which makes the heat wave more intense in urban than rural areas and the urban warming during the extreme heat wave stronger than its climatological mean.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Earth Observation of Climate Change research group (http://green.tea.ac.cn) for supplying the high-resolution land-use data for China; readers can contact author J. Wang (wangjun@tea.ac.cn) for these data. NCEP-FNL reanalysis data used were produced by NCEP and provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research at http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds083.2/. Observation data from the heat wave were provided by the National Meteorological Information Center, and are also available from corresponding author Z. Yan (yzw@tea.ac.cn). This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41475078) and Strategic Priority Research Program-Climate Change: Carbon Budget and Relevant Issues of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grants XDA05090105 and XDA05090207). We acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their efforts in evaluating this paper, without which the quality of the paper could not be improved.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Regional Climate-Environment for Temperate East Asia (RCE-TEA), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Jun Wang, Zhongwei Yan & Jinming Feng

  2. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Xiao-Wei Quan

  3. NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA

    Xiao-Wei Quan

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  1. Jun Wang
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Correspondence to Zhongwei Yan.

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Wang, J., Yan, Z., Quan, XW. et al. Urban warming in the 2013 summer heat wave in eastern China. Clim Dyn 48, 3015–3033 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3248-7

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