Reduced Urban Heat Island intensity under warmer conditions

• Published in: Environmental research letters 2018-06, Vol.13 (6), p.64003
• Main Authors: Scott, Anna A, Waugh, Darryn W, Zaitchik, Ben F
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cities; Heat; heatwave; High temperature; micrometeorology; Rural areas; Thermal pollution; Urban areas; urban climate; Urban heat islands; Urban populations; Variability; Weather
• ISSN: 1748-9326; 1748-9326
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aabd6c

The Urban Heat Island (UHI), the tendency for urban areas to be hotter than rural regions, represents a significant health concern in summer as urban populations are exposed to elevated temperatures. A number of studies suggest that the UHI increases during warmer conditions, however there has been no investigation of this for a large ensemble of cities. Here we compare urban and rural temperatures in 54 US cities for 2000-2015 and show that the intensity of the Urban Heat Island, measured here as the differences in daily-minimum or daily-maximum temperatures between urban and rural stations or ΔT, in fact tends to decrease with increasing temperature in most cities (38/54). This holds when investigating daily variability, heat extremes, and variability across climate zones and is primarily driven by changes in rural areas. We relate this change to large-scale or synoptic weather conditions, and find that the lowest ΔT nights occur during moist weather conditions. We also find that warming cities have not experienced an increasing Urban Heat Island effect.