Determining the Effect of Extreme Weather Events on Human Participation in Recreation and Tourism: A Case Study of the Toronto Zoo

Micah Hewer

doi:10.3390/atmos11010099

Abstract

This study devises a novel approach for defining extreme weather events and assessing their effects on human participation in recreation and tourism, based on a case study of attendance at the Toronto Zoo (Toronto, ON, Canada). Daily zoo attendance data from 1999 to 2018 was obtained and analyzed in connection with daily weather data from local weather stations for the maximum temperature, minimum temperature, total precipitation, and maximum wind speed. The “climatic distance” method, used for evaluating representative weather stations for case studies in applied climatology, was employed to rank and select surrounding weather stations that most accurately captured daily weather observations recorded at the Toronto Zoo from 1990 to 1992. Extreme weather events can be defined as lying in the outermost (most unusual) 10 percent of a place’s history. Using this definition as the foundation, a percentile approach was developed to identify and assess the effects of extreme weather events across the following thresholds: the 99th percentile, the 95th percentile, and the 90th percentile, as well as less than the 1st percentile, less than the 5th percentile, and less than the 10th percentile. Additionally, revealed, theoretical, and binary thresholds were also assessed to verify their merit and determine their effects, and were compared to the extreme weather events defined by the percentiles approach. Overall, extreme daily weather events had statistically significant negative effects on zoo attendance in Toronto, apart from a few cases, such as the positive effect of usually warm daytime temperatures in the winter and usually cool nighttime temperatures in the summer. The most influential weather event across all seasons was extremely hot temperatures, which has important implications for climate change impact assessments.

Highlights

Tourism climatology is the study of the relationship between recreation and tourism and weather and climate [1,2,3]
The first study to look at the weather sensitivity of zoo attendance and assess climate change impacts was conducted by Aylen [4], who looked at Chester Zoo in the United
Looking at the considerable differences in the way tourism participation responded to extreme daily weather events across the seasons, this study emphasizes the importance of defining different seasons related to tourism participation for a given activity and analyzing the effect of weather and climate variability, as well as extreme weather events, on those seasons separately

Summary

Introduction

Tourism climatology is the study of the relationship between recreation and tourism and weather and climate [1,2,3]. The first study to look at the weather sensitivity of zoo attendance and assess climate change impacts was conducted by Aylen [4], who looked at Chester Zoo in the United. Hewer and Gough [5] assessed the weather sensitivity of attendance at the Toronto Zoo in Canada, and conducted a follow-up climate change impact assessment [6]. Both Aylen et al [4] and Hewer and Gough [5] used a revealed preferences approach including multiple weather variables to create predictive weather sensitivity models. The series of tourism climatology papers that focused on zoo attendance emerged from the United States, looking at thermal comfort for the Phoenix and Atlanta zoos [7], as well as the effect of synoptic weather systems for the Atmosphere 2020, 11, 99; doi:10.3390/atmos11010099 www.mdpi.com/journal/atmosphere

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Discussion

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