Comparative analysis of the characteristics of extreme temperature changes between cities and mountains in China

Abstract

More than half of the world’s population is living in towns and cities according to the United Nations Population Fund (http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm). The rapid urbanization, especially in China, has significantly influenced the climate at least at a local scale. The increasing extreme temperature (ET) occurrence in urban areas prompts us to examine the historical and current situation of ET occurrence in cities by comparing them with that in mountains which provide a relatively natural record of the earth’s climate because they are far away from cities and it is not influenced by urbanization effects. The ET occurrence was determined by multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA), a well-accepted method aiming at finding the ET thresholds according to the characteristics of the data themselves. Warming trends in the city and mountain sites and the frequencies, intensities, and severities of ET occurrence were compared using climatic data between 1959 and 2011. The results show that the warming amplitude of the cities is not higher than that of the mountain regions, even with urbanization effect. The extremely low temperatures (ELT) in the cities occurred significantly lower in frequency and severity compared with that in the mountain sites. However, the intensity of ELT is generally higher than that in the mountains. Only the cities at low latitudes in China have experienced more frequent and severe extremely high temperature (EHT) occurrence than the mountain sites in recent decades. But the intensity was not as high as that in the mountain sites. We conclude that the current situation of ET occurrence in the cities is not very serious if we consider the ET occurrence of the mountains as the “new norm.” However, it is highly possible that the frequency of ET, especially the EHT, in the cities would increase and will be even more than that of the mountains. Moreover, the changes of ET occurrences before and after 1980 are distinguishable, which could be attributed to urbanization.