Comparative Analysis of China Surface Air Temperature Series for the Past 100 Years

Abstract Using the reconstructed continuous and homogenized surface air temperature (SAT) series for 16 cities across eastern China (where the greatest industrial developments in China have taken place) back to the nineteenth century, the authors examine linear trends of SAT. The regional-mean SAT over eastern China shows a warming trend of 1.52°C (100 yr)−1 during 1909–2010. It mainly occurred in the past 4 decades and this agrees well with the variability in another SAT series developed from a much denser station network (over 400 sites) across this part of China since 1951. This study collects population data for 245 sites (from these 400+ locations) and split these into five equally sized groups based on population size. Comparison of these five groups across different durations from 30 to 60 yr in length indicates that differences in population only account for between 9% and 24% of the warming since 1951. To show that a larger urbanization impact is very unlikely, the study additionally determines how much can be explained by some large-scale climate indices. Anomalies of large-scale climate indices such as the tropical Indian Ocean SST and the Siberian atmospheric circulation systems account for at least 80% of the total warming trends.

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A Remote-Sensing Method of Selecting Reference Stations for Evaluating Urbanization Effect on Surface Air Temperature Trends

Journal of Climate ◽

10.1175/2010jcli3658.1 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 24 (13) ◽

pp. 3179-3189 ◽

Cited By ~ 42

Author(s):

Yuyu Ren ◽

Guoyu Ren

Keyword(s):

Remote Sensing ◽

Air Temperature ◽

Mainland China ◽

Surface Air Temperature ◽

Image Data ◽

Temperature Series ◽

Urbanization Effect ◽

Temperature Reference ◽

Weather Stations ◽

Reference Climate

Abstract In the global lands, the bias of urbanization effects still exits in the surface air temperature series of many city weather stations to a certain extent. Reliable reference climate stations need to be selected for the detection and correction of the local manmade warming bias. The underlying image data of remote sensing retrieval is adopted in this study to obtain the spatial distribution of surface brightness temperature, and the surface air temperature reference stations are determined based on the locations of the weather stations in the remote sensing surface thermal fields. Among the 672 national reference climate stations and national basic weather stations of mainland China, for instance, 113 surface air temperature reference stations are selected for applying this method. Compared with the average surface air temperature series of the reference stations obtained by a more sophisticated method developed in China, this method is proven to be robust and applicable, and can be adopted for the evaluation and adjustment study on the urbanization bias of the currently used air temperature records of surface climate stations in the global lands.

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