Recent decelerating trends of urban warming in Japan

Abstract

Temperature trends in Japanese cities were analyzed using data at 433 stations on the AMeDAS network from April 1979 to March 2023. It was found that urban warming, defined by a temperature increase at urban stations relative to the surrounding non-urban stations, had slowed down in the latter part of the analysis period. The deceleration of urban warming was found in all the three regions of Japan, and not only for stations in densely inhabited areas but also those at weakly urbanized sites where the surrounding population density was 100-300 km^-2.