Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Regional Climate Impacts of Future
Urbanization in China
Xinli Ke, Jinyan Zhan, Enjun Ma and Juan Huang
Urbanization is one of the most important anthropogenic influences on surface
climate. The process of urbanization has a profound impact on local, regional, and
global climate change by natural to artificial land use/cover changes and anthro-
pogenic heat emissions. Therefore, with the rapid urbanization, the impact of
urbanization especially urban land expansion on global climate change has been
one of the hot topics in research fields (Lei et al.
2008
). In some specific areas,
urban land use change even surpasses greenhouse gases in regulating climate,
becoming an important factor which exerts impact on regional and global climate
change (Jin et al.
2005
). Previous studies have analyzed the effects of urban land
surface change at the microscale; however, it is also necessary to study how both
the past and future urbanization might affect the weather and surface climate.
Urban agglomeration has gradually become the main form of urbanization in
China. This chapter presents three case studies on surface climatic impacts of further
urbanization in China. The first case study aims to identify the impact of urban land
use change on regional temperature and precipitation in summer in the Beijing-
Tianjin-Tangshan Metropolitan (Great Beijing) area during 2030-2040. The second
study carries out scenario analysis of land use change, and simulated the future
regional temperature with Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in
Southern Jiangsu province, another typical region of urbanization in China. Finally,
the last case study analyzes the impact of urbanization on surface climate under
different urbanization patterns, i.e., baseline scenario, centralized urbanization
scenarios, and decentralized urbanization scenarios in Wuhan Metropolitan region.
