Changes in observed climate extremes in global urban areas

By V. Mishra, Auroop Ratan Ganguly, Bart Nijssen, Dennis P. Lettenmaier. 2015

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate extremes have profound implications for urban infrastructure and human society, but studies of observed changes in climate extremes over the global urban areas are few, even though more than half of the global population now resides in urban areas. Here, using observed station data for 217 urban areas across the globe, we show that these urban areas have experienced significant increases (p-value <0.05) in the number of heat waves during the period 1973–2012, while the frequency of cold waves has declined. Almost half of the urban areas experienced significant increases in the number of extreme hot days, while almost 2/3 showed significant increases in the frequency of extreme hot nights. Extreme windy days declined substantially during the last four decades with statistically significant declines in about 60% in the urban areas. Significant increases (p-value <0.05) in the frequency of daily precipitation extremes and in annual maximum precipitation occurred at smaller fractions (17 and 10% respectively) of the total urban areas, with about half as many urban areas showing statistically significant downtrends as uptrends. Changes in temperature and wind extremes, estimated as the result of a 40 year linear trend, differed for urban and non-urban pairs, while changes in indices of extreme precipitation showed no clear differentiation for urban and selected non-urban stations.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eebaf7c976d03c12f78bf5864fc4c7b7a82e077a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. Christopher J. Kucharik
2. D. Stone
3. Monica G. Turner

In Environmental Engineering

1. Rohini Kumar
2. Christopher J. Kucharik

Citations in the corpus

• Scale-dependent interactions between tree canopy cover and impervious surfaces reduce daytime urban heat during summer (2019, background): “Strategies to improve cities’ resilience to future climates are critical as urban areas expand, urban populations grow, and extreme heat events increase in frequency in a warming world (8, 9).”
• Heat wave exposure in India in current, 1.5 °C, and 2.0 °C worlds (2017, background): “…in recent years (Rahmstorf and Coumou 2011, Sun et al 2014, Christidis et al 2015), including major global urban areas, where most of the world’s human population now resides (Mishra et al 2015, Matthews et al 2017), and in India (Dash and Mamgain 2011, Rohini et al 2016, Panda et al 2017).”