Can tourism climatic indices reflect the impact of cold surges?

Yan Dong,Lan Xia

doi:10.5937/gp25-32853

Abstract

Hibernation tourism in East and Southeast Asia is directly impacted by wintertime cold surges, which can result in high winds, extreme low temperatures, frost, freezing rain, and even sandstorms. This study compares two existing tourism climatic indexes-the Comprehensive Comfort Index (CCI) and the Tourism Climate Index (TCI)-to establish their ability to capture the full impact of cold surges on the tourism industry. From a climatic perspective, the TCI is more sensitive than the CCI, revealing a significant negative correlation with cold surge days. As illustrated here using a specific case study, the colder surge days in a month, the lower the TCI score for that month. This paper also evaluates potential reasons for the observed disparity between the two indices and proposes that the TCI exhibits a higher temperature standard and preference for long sunshine hours than does the CCI.

Highlights

Hibernation tourism, known as cold avoidance tourism, has become an important industry sector in recent decades (Feng et al, 2010)
The Comprehensive Comfort Index (CCI) deems Shangri-La unsuitable for tourism, whereas the Tourism Climate Index (TCI), which is more strongly weighted towards sunshine hours, considers the region suitable
The potential impacts of climate change on this sector are the focus of research both globally (Scott et al, 2012) and regionally/nationally (Steiger & Scott., 2020), previous work has focused primarily on the skiing industry (Steiger & Stötter, 2013; Scott et al, 2019; 2020; Steiger et al, 2019; Steiger & Scott., 2020), which is already being impacted by insufficient snow cover and shorter winter seasons (Steiger et al, 2019; Steiger & Scott, 2020)

Summary

Introduction

Hibernation tourism, known as cold avoidance tourism, has become an important industry sector in recent decades (Feng et al, 2010). In one recent study, Lin et al (2013) investigated the number of climate comfortable days during the winter months (November to April) in 11 tourist cities; they reported that Sanya and Haikou on Hainan both experience 181 days with temperatures of >16°C, while Jinghong in Yunnan experiences 145 days > 16°C.

Results

Conclusion