Springer nature's professional academic journal nature climate change recently published a climate science research paper, which predicted that under the scenario of high emission climate change, the global urban areas will heat up by 4.4 degrees Celsius by 2100, and the humidity will be relatively low.

The paper points out that more than half of the world's population lives in cities, and the warming range of cities is generally greater than that of rural or suburban areas, because various concrete and asphalt surfaces will absorb more heat and hinder cooling. It is very important to incorporate these variables into the prediction of climate change for understanding the future urban climate, but it is not easy to put them into practice.

To this end, Zhao Lei, the corresponding author and first author of the paper, University of Illinois, USA, and his colleagues constructed a statistical model to simulate the complex climate change in urban areas. They then applied the urban climate simulator to the global climate model results of 26 medium and high emission scenarios. This process can translate the rough climate model results into the prediction of temperature and relative humidity at the city level, thus quantifying the climate change and uncertainty.

The author estimates that by the end of this century, that is, 2100, global cities will be warming by 1.9 ℃ on average under the medium emission scenario and 4.4 ℃ under the high emission scenario, and the consistency between climate models is good. They also predicted that the relative humidity of cities would decline almost as a whole, which would make surface evaporation more efficient, and that adaptation strategies such as urban vegetation might be effective.

The authors of the paper said that the results of these studies will be made public, hoping to help urban planners and decision makers estimate the climate change of specific cities in the whole 21st century.

Source: China Environment News