Urbanization-related warming in local temperature records: a review

Abstract

There have long been arguments about the impact of urbanization on local meteorological observations. This letter reviews up-to-date studies of the urbanization-related warming in the observed land surface air temperature series in China. Many previous studies have suggested that, over the past few decades, the local warming due to urbanization could have been about 0.1 °C/10 yr, or even larger. However, based on recently developed homogenized temperature records, the estimated urban bias is smaller. Major uncertainties arise from either the data quality or the techniques used to estimate the urbanization effect. A key example is the ‘observation-minus-reanalysis’ method, which tends to overestimate the urban signal in this region, partly due to systematic bias in the multi-decadal variability of surface air temperature in the reanalysis data. It is expected that improved numerical modeling with high-resolution information regarding the changing land surface in the region will help to further understand and quantify the effect of urbanization in local temperature records.