Wednesday, March 03, 2010

UHI Again

ABSTRACT
Global hourly surface temperature observations and 1 km resolution population density data for the year 2000 are used together to quantify the average urban heat island (UHI) effect. While the rate of warming with population increase is the greatest at the lowest population densities, some warming continues with population increases even for densely populated cities. Statistics like those presented here could be used to correct the surface temperature record for spurious warming caused by the UHI effect, providing better estimates of temperature trends.
pop-density-2000

All station pairs within 150 km of each other had their 1-year average difference in temperature related to their difference in population. Averaging of these station pairs’ results was done in 10 population bins each for Station1 and Station2, with bin boundaries at 0, 20, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, and 50000 persons per sq. km.

ISH-station-warming-vs-pop-density