Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
- type 18 (meadows): 11% of all climatological stations;
- type 20 (crops and partially cultivated land): 16% of all climatological stations.
Approximately 20% of all climatological stations that record temperature can be
found on an additional four different types of CLC land cover:
- type 6 (airports): 5.2%;
- type 15 (vineyards): 4.8%;
- type 21 (mainly farm areas, interspersed with nature reserves): 5.5%;
- type 23 (leaved forests): 4.8%.
These eight different types of land cover represent, in total, more than 80% of
locations of the climatological stations. Two of the land cover types correspond to
built-up environments (types 2 and 6, which in total represent 21% of all stations).
Open agricultural areas (types 12 and 18), as well as hedged farmland areas or more
complex farmland areas that have a mixture of crops and different featured
formations (types 20 and 21), represent 29% and just over 21% of all the stations.
It is also interesting to point out that almost 5% of all of the stations are found in
forest areas. This is almost impossible because according to the rules drawn up for
the localization of such meteorological stations it is not possible to place the stations
in forest areas. These areas are largely dominated by woods, open spaces exist over
a small surface area and the CLC does not recognize this.
Amongst the 36 other land cover types proposed by the CLC, 12 of them did not
have any meteorological station. These 12 land cover types included: type 7
(extraction of minerals), type 14 (paddy fields), type 17 (olive groves), type
34 (glaciers), and type 43 (coastal lagoons).
2.4.2.2.
How did temperatures react to CLC?
The table that has just been described is used as a physical support for a
particular statistical process: correlating the temperature of the stations with the
relevant type of land cover on which the station can be found. This process requires
a large number of individuals. With the frequency of each land cover type not being
high enough to cope with such a correlation analysis, amalgamations have been
made. The following groups have been created with the aim of estimating the
influence that each of the four main land cover categories has on temperature:
- built-up areas: includes all man-made areas (392 occurrences);
- complex zones: corresponds to all those areas that cannot be described as
being cultivated or meadow (388 occurrences);
- open spaces: includes cultivated areas and meadows (402 occurrences);
- leaved forests (143 cases); coniferous forests have not been included because
they might introduce some bias into the results of the correlations as they tend to be
found in mountainous and thus, cold regions.
