Abstract
Urbanization is one of the most significant contributing factors to anthropogenic climate change. However, a lack of projected city land use data has posed significant challenges to factoring urbanization into climate change modeling. Thus, the results from current models may contain considerable errors in estimating future climate scenarios. The Pearl River Delta region was selected as a case study to provide insight into how large-scale urbanization and different climate change scenarios impact the local climate. This study adopts projected land use data from freely available satellite imagery and applies dynamic simulation land use results to the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). The simulation periods cover the summer periods in 2010 and 2029–2031, the latter of which is averaged to represent the year 2030. The WRF simulation used the observed local climate conditions in 2010 to represent the current scenario and the projected local climate changes for 2030 as the future scenario. Under all three future climate change scenarios, the warming trend is prominent (around 1–2 °C increase), with a widespread reduction in wind speed in inland areas (1–2 ms−1). The vulnerability of human health to thermal stress was evaluated by adopting the wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT). The results from the future scenarios suggest a high public health risk due to rising temperatures in the future. This study provides a methodology for a more comprehensive understanding of future urbanization and its impact on regional climate by using freely available satellite images and WRF simulation tools. The simulated temperature and WBGT results can serve local governments and stakeholders in city planning and the creation of action plans that will reduce the potential vulnerability of human health to excessive heat.
Highlights
More than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas [1], and most developing countries are still undergoing rapid urbanization [2]
Most of the time, the wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) in urban areas is higher than 28 ◦ C, which falls under the “severe warning” category
The results showed that the PRD region would generally experience increased temperature due to climate change and urbanization
Summary
More than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas [1], and most developing countries are still undergoing rapid urbanization [2]. Megacities and mega-urban regions, which host more than 10 million people, are emerging worldwide. By 2030, almost 9% of the world’s population will live in 41 megacities. Given their fast-growing urban populations and urban sprawl, 10 of the 12 cities projected to become megacities by 2030 are in Asia and Africa [6,7]. There is an urgent need to understand future urban climate conditions under both urbanization and climate change so that cities and regions can develop corresponding scienceand evidence-based mitigation and adaptation strategies
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