Microclimates traditionally have been defined as “the climates in a small space” (Geiger, 1965, p. 2) or “the physical state of the atmosphere close to a very small area of the earth's surface, often in relation to living matter such as crops or insects” (McIntosh, 1972, p. 179). Microclimates are at one end of a hierarchy of spatiotemporal scales (Table 1). The spatial dimension is variously given as less than 100 m (Barry, 1970) and 1 cm to 1 km (Oke, 1978). Some climatologists insert local or topoclimates with scales of 1–10 km (Thornthwaite, 1953) between micro- and mesoclimates. At the other extreme, Gates (1980) has studied microclimates within mm of the surface of an organism that create the smallest scale gradients controlling energy and mass exchanges between it and its environment. Thus, microclimates may span the spatial scale from leaves to hillslopes. Temporal scales for microclimates may be comparably diverse, from less than 24 hours (Barry, 1970) to a range from seconds...
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Sharpe, D.M. (1987). Microclimatology . In: Climatology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30749-4_115
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