Abstract
Confounding factors like urbanization and land-use change could introduce uncertainty to the estimation of global temperature trends related to climate change. In this work, we introduce a new way to investigate the nexus between temporal trends of temperature and urbanization data at the global scale in the period from 1992 to 2013. We analyze air temperature data recorded from more than 5000 weather stations worldwide and nightlight satellite measurements as a proxy for urbanization. By means of a range of statistical methods, our results quantify and outline that the temporal evolution of urbanization affects temperature trends at multiple spatial scales with significant differences at regional and continental scales. A statistically significant agreement in temperature and nightlight trends is detected, especially in low and middle-income regions, where urbanization is rapidly growing. Conversely, in continents such as Europe and North America, increases in temperature trends are typically detected along with non-significant nightlight trends.
Highlights
The urban transition leads to alterations in landscape conditions and to important modifications in the urban climate, along with several environmental problems e.g., on water use and quality, on the generation of air pollution, and on the production of solid waste and sewage [1,2]
Results highlight significant positive relationships between Urban Heat Island (UHI) magnitude, ecological setting and impervious surface area (ISA), and that nightlights are good estimators of urban sprawl and are more objective than methods based on population density
We introduce a new approach to quantify the relationship between urbanization dynamics and thermal impact, by relating the temperature variations in recent years to the corresponding variations in nightlight data
Summary
The urban transition leads to alterations in landscape conditions and to important modifications in the urban climate, along with several environmental problems e.g., on water use and quality, on the generation of air pollution, and on the production of solid waste and sewage [1,2]. Freshwater resources, and increase in extreme weather events (e.g., heatwaves and droughts) are expected to lead to several consequences on human health in terms of e.g., heat stress, cardio-respiratory, and infectious diseases [2,8] In this regard, we must consider that 55% of the world population is residing in urban areas in 2018, which is projected to reach 68% by 2050 [9]. In the context of global climate change, it is crucial to better investigate how urban growth affects temperature record trends to consistently attribute the causes of observed warming at wider scales [10,11,12,13,14,15,16].
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