Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Science: Urbanization has raised temperatures by almost 2°C

From the Department of not-at-all-shocking-but-seldom-reported comes this new paper:
This study aims to estimate the affect of urbanisation on daily maximum and minimum temperatures in the United Kingdom. Urban fractions were calculated for 10 km × 10 km areas surrounding meteorological weather stations. Using robust regression a linear relationship between urban fraction and temperature difference between station measurements and ERA‐Interim reanalysis temperatures was estimated. 
For an urban fraction of 1.0, the daily minimum 2‐m temperature was estimated to increase by 1.90 ± 0.88 K while the daily maximum temperature was not significantly affected by urbanisation. This result was then applied to the whole United Kingdom with a maximum T min urban heat island intensity (UHII) of about 1.7K in London and with many UK cities having T min UHIIs above one degree.
This paper finds through the method of observation minus reanalysis that urbanisation has significantly increased the daily minimum 2‐m temperature in the United Kingdom by up to 1.70 K.
This isn't any surprise to anyone who has remotely been paying attention.  There is a boatload of anecdotal evidence for urban growth increasing temperatures: weather stations that were on grass runways in the 1920s are now in the middle of concrete and tarmac runways, etc.  There's also the mystery of why temperatures are reported to be the hottest ever recorded but the high temperature records are all old (and sometimes very old - like the 1913 date for hottest temperature ever recorded in the USA).

Of course, if the reported warming is mainly due to increased in daily low temperature, then this study on urbanization provides a very neat explanation - all the concrete and asphalt absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, raising the recorded low temperature.

But hey, don't let actual science get in the way of a multi-trillion dollar power grab by the global New World Order.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Yep. We've been talking about that for years, and been ignored... sigh

McChuck said...

AGW is all power and money grabs, all the way down. Reality and rationality have nothing to do with it.