Numerical Simulation of the Surface Air Temperature Change Caused by Increases of Urban Area, Anthropogenic Heat, and Building Aspect Ratio in the Kanto-Koshin Area

Abstract

We investigated a warming trend in the Kanto-Koshin area during a 30-year period (1976-2006). The warming trends at AMeDAS stations were estimated to average a little less than 1.3°C/30 years in both summer and winter. These warming trends were considered to include the trends of large-scale and local-scale warming effects. Because a regional climate model with 20-km resolution without any urban parameterization could not well express the observed warming trends and their daily variations, we investigated whether a mesoscale atmospheric model with an urban canopy scheme could express them.
To make the simulations realistic, we used 3 sets of real data: National Land Numerical Information datasets for the estimation of the land use area fractions, anthropogenic heat datasets varying in space and time, and GIS datasets of building shapes in the Tokyo Metropolis for the setting of building aspect ratios. The time integrations over 2 months were executed for both summer and winter. A certain level of correlation was found between the simulated temperature rises and the observed warming trends at the AMeDAS stations. The daily variation of the temperature rises in urban grids was higher at night than in the daytime, and its range was larger in winter than in summer. Such tendencies were consistent with the observational results.
From factor analyses, we figured out the classic and some unexpected features of urban warming, as follows: (1) Land use distribution change (mainly caused by the decrease of vegetation cover) had the largest daytime warming effect, and the effect was larger in summer than in winter; (2) anthropogenic heat had a warming effect with 2 small peaks owing to the daily variation of the released heat and the timing of stable atmospheric layer formation; and (3) increased building height was the largest factor contributing to the temperature rises, with a single peak in early morning.