Impacts of anthropogenic heat on regional climate patterns

Block, Alexander; Keuler, Klaus; Schaller, E.

doi:10.1029/2004gl019852

Cited by 95 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…By way of illustration, the average energy consumption for Germany is 1.3 Wm −2 , for Japan it is 2.9 Wm −2 , for the Netherlands it is almost 4 Wm −2 , while for certain industrialized regions it can easily be 20-70 Wm −2 (IIASA, 2003;Crutzen, 2004). Temperature perturbations of up to 0.9 K were found by Block et al (2004) for a 90-day simulation of a constant surface flux of 2 Wm −2 over Europe's land areas, which suggest that the significant regional temperature trend enhancements discussed in this work and in Paper I could be partly explained by this process. In general, the presence of surface warming processes would require a better understanding of the structure of the ABL (both during the day and night), the effect of surface processes on it and the possibility that it affects much larger regions through advection and transport.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, Block et al (2004) investigated the influence of 'anthropogenic heat' on surface temperatures, which is released by densely populated industrialized areas using a (regional) climate model. The proposed physical mechanism is that energy -which is consumed in large quantities in these areas -is a conserved quantity in any physical system, and at some point this energy will be released into the atmosphere in the form of a direct near-surface temperature (energy) perturbation.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence for influence of anthropogenic surface processes on lower tropospheric and surface temperature trends

Laat

Maurellis

2006

Intl Journal of Climatology

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In de Laat and Maurellis (2004), a new framework was introduced in the form of a spatial-thresholding trend technique for analyzing the correlation between anthropogenic surface processes (e.g. changes in land use, albedo, soil moisture, groundwater levels, solar absorption by soot or energy consumption) and lower tropospheric and surface temperature trends for the period 1979-2001. In situ measured surface and satellite-measured lower tropospheric temperature trends were shown to be higher in the vicinity of industrialized regions, while such higher trends were not found in enhanced greenhouse gas (GHG) climate model simulations of temperature. It was suggested that surface and lower tropospheric temperature trends appeared to be influenced by anthropogenic non-GHG processes on the earth's surface.In this paper, we verify the robustness of the thresholding technique and confirm our earlier conclusions on the basis of an extended analysis and two additional data sets. We confirm the presence of a temperature change-industrialization correlation by analyzing the data with an additional statistical method and further confirm the absence of the above correlation in climate model simulations of enhanced GHG warming. Our findings thus provide an important test of climate model performance on regional scales. These findings suggest that over the last two decades non-GHG anthropogenic processes have also contributed significantly to surface temperature changes. We identify one process that potentially could contribute to the observed temperature patterns, although there certainly may be other processes involved.

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Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for influence of anthropogenic surface processes on lower tropospheric and surface temperature trends

Laat

Maurellis

2006

Intl Journal of Climatology

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“…Anthropogenic heat (AH) can increase turbulent fluxes in sensible and latent heat (Oke, 1988), implying that it can modulate local and regional meteorological processes (Ichinose et al, 1999;Block et al, 2004;Fan and Sailor, 2005;Ferguson and Woodbury, 2007;Zhu et al, 2010;Feng et al, 2012Feng et al, , 2014Menberg et al, 2013;Ryu et al, 2013;Wu and Yang, 2013;Bohnenstengel et al, 2014;Chen et al, 2014a;Meng et al, 2011;Yu et al, 2014;Xie et al, 2016) and thereby exert an important influence on the formation and the distribution of ozone (Ryu et al, 2013;Yu et al, 2014;Xie et al, 2016) as well as aerosols (Yu et al, 2014;Xie et al, 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Changes in regional meteorology induced by anthropogenic heat and their impacts on air quality in South China

et al. 2016

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Abstract. Anthropogenic heat (AH) emissions from human activities can change the urban circulation and thereby affect the air pollution in and around cities. Based on statistic data, the spatial distribution of AH flux in South China is estimated. With the aid of the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF/Chem), in which the AH parameterization is developed to incorporate the gridded AH emissions with temporal variation, simulations for January and July in 2014 are performed over South China. By analyzing the differences between the simulations with and without adding AH, the impact of AH on regional meteorology and air quality is quantified. The results show that the regional annual mean AH fluxes over South China are only 0.87 W m −2 , but the values for the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region can be close to 60 W m −2 . These AH emissions can significantly change the urban heat island and urban-breeze circulations in big cities. In the PRD city cluster, 2 m air temperature rises by 1.1 • in January and over 0.5 • in July, the planetary boundary layer height (PBLH) increases by 120 m in January and 90 m in July, 10 m wind speed is intensified to over 0.35 m s −1 in January and 0.3 m s −1 in July, and accumulative precipitation is enhanced by 20-40 % in July. These changes in meteorological conditions can significantly impact the spatial and vertical distributions of air pollutants. Due to the increases in PBLH, surface wind speed and upward vertical movement, the concentrations of primary air pollutants decrease near the surface and increase in the upper levels. But the vertical changes in O 3 concentrations show the different patterns in different seasons. The surface O 3 concentrations in big cities increase with maximum values of over 2.5 ppb in January, while O 3 is reduced at the lower layers and increases at the upper layers above some megacities in July. This phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that chemical effects can play a significant role in O 3 changes over South China in winter, while the vertical movement can be the dominant effect in some big cities in summer. Adding the gridded AH emissions can better describe the heterogeneous impacts of AH on regional meteorology and air quality, suggesting that more studies on AH should be carried out in climate and air quality assessments.

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“…This correction is uncertain, as the near-surface temperature gradient can be affected by other causes, such as urbanization (e.g. Block et al, 2004;Ferguson and Woodbury, 2004) or groundwater flow (Smith and Chapman, 1983). Such effects should not affect our correction to first order.…”

Section: Comparison Of the Underground And Surface Temperaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term climate change and surface versus underground temperature measurements in Paris

et al. 2005

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Careful temperature measurements performed from 1783 to 1852 in underground galleries, 28 m below the Paris Observatory, are compared with current measurements performed in a limestone quarry, 20 m below ground surface, and with local and European surface temperature records. When averaged using a backward 11-year moving window, the surface temperature time series looks similar and exhibits the already well-known 1°C temperature increase over the last century. In addition, since about 1987, a steeper increase of about 0.07°C per year is noticed on all surface records. Underground temperatures, unaffected by surface fluctuations and averaging procedures, show a 0.9°C increase and thus confirm the trend indicated by the surface records. The averaged time series of the temperature in Paris and of the Wolf number, an indicator of sunspot activity, were reasonably well correlated till 1987 but deviated significantly from each other after that date. The long-term connection between surface temperature and solar cycles is further supported by a temporal analysis of the frequency content at 11 years and 5.5 years. Visual correlations between temperature and sunspot numbers, unconvincing when using recent records, appear more striking with underground data from 1783 to 1852. This analysis suggests that solar activity played an important role in temperature changes till the last century, but that different processes, possibly related to human-induced changes in the climate system, have been taking place lately with increasing intensity, especially since 1987.

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Impacts of anthropogenic heat on regional climate patterns

Cited by 95 publications

References 7 publications

Evidence for influence of anthropogenic surface processes on lower tropospheric and surface temperature trends

Evidence for influence of anthropogenic surface processes on lower tropospheric and surface temperature trends

Changes in regional meteorology induced by anthropogenic heat and their impacts on air quality in South China

Long-term climate change and surface versus underground temperature measurements in Paris

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