Urban sprawl can inhibit convection and decrease rainfall over an Amazonian city during a squall line type phenomenon

Urban effects on precipitation: Do the diversity of research strategies and urban characteristics preclude general conclusions?

“…As shown in Figure 1, the 40 studied urban areas are mostly located in North America, Asia, and Europe, almost all of them are in the northern hemisphere, and the majority of cities are in coastal areas. Still, during the selection of articles, we found a few of them focusing on the southern hemisphere, two studying African urban areas, Nairobi in Kenya (Ongoma et al, 2015), and the Middle-Eastern Region in Tanzania (Anande & Park, 2021), one in central America (Jauregui & Romales, 1996), two south American cities, San Miguel de Tucumán in Argentina and Manaus in Brazil (Freitag et al, 2018;Sátyro et al, 2021), and one article for Oceania investigating Australian urban areas (Rosenfeld, 2000). However, these listed articles could not be selected for the analysis in this article because of their methodology or dataset types descriptions, or inexplicit conclusions.…”

“…Urban areas might impact precipitation through diverse processes such as the generation of urban heat islands, the emissions of aerosols, or even the increase in surface roughness (Han et al, 2014). The impacts that are commonly expected are an increase in precipitation over urban centers (Mohapatra et al, 2021;Sátyro et al, 2021) and over downwind areas (Daniels et al, 2016;Le Roy et al, 2020). Nevertheless, various studies found more contrasting results, reporting in some cases a decrease in precipitation or no impact (Abdemanafi, 2017;Argüeso et al, 2016;Freitag et al, 2018).…”