Published in ERW, 16 Sep 2015
A large-scale study of how urban areas affect the climate has revealed that US cities are, on average, nearly 2°C warmer than their surroundings in the summer. In cities built within forests, such as Washington DC and Atlanta, mean daytime land surface temperatures were up to 3.3°C warmer than their environs, the researchers found, whilst those built on arid lands, such as Phoenix, were about 2.2°C cooler.
“Urbanization has an uneven impact on surface climate,” said Lahouari Bounoua of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, US. “It’s small in area but its effects are permanent [on] the surface temperature, the surface water partitioning and the carbon sequestration … I think we could achieve an optimal balance between [these effects] if we consider the balance of the fractions of impervious surface area versus vegetation, and more importantly the type of vegetation.” […]
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