Representative air temperature of thermally heterogeneous urban areas using the measured pressure gradient

Abstract

A method to measure an area-averaged ground air temperature based on the hydrostatic equation is shown. The method was devised to overcome the problem of finding the most representative surface air temperature over a wide region, a problem that has seriously hindered the description of urban heat islands. The vertical pressure gradient is used and the hydrostatic equation is applied to estimate the average air temperature between two barometers, which is here called the hydrostatic temperature. The error analysis shows that the hydrostatic temperature can be estimated with a systematic error of 1.8°C and a random error of 0.7°C in the case in which the two barometers have a vertical separation of 228 m. The measured hydrostatic temperature agreed with the average of the directly measured temperature within 0.7°C rms. For this barometer separation, the representative area of the hydrostatic temperature was experimentally found to be a 12-km-radius circle. The size of this area decreased when the vertical separation of the barometers decreased. The hydrostatic temperature is compared with the average directly measured temperature for various areas. The maximum correlation between them occurred for a circular area with a 12-km radius centered on the pressure measurements. The size of the representative area for this method is larger than that for the direct measurement of air temperature. © 2004 American Meteorological Society.