Publication

Towards a statistical description of intra-urban climate variations

2025

Abstract

Urban-induced changes in local microclimate, such as the urban heat island effect and air pollution, are known to vary with city size, leading to power law or logarithmic relations between average climate variables and city-scale quantities (e.g., total population or area). However, these approaches suffer from biases related to the choice of city boundaries and they neglect intra-urban variations of city properties. In this study we use high-resolution data of urban temperatures and annual concentrations of particulate matter together with population density and street network properties and show that their marginal and joint probability distributions follow universal finite-size scaling functions. These results extend previous findings on city-scale relations, offering a novel description of intra-urban fluctuations of climate characteristics.

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/ef22600c-fee1-45b5-8cc7-595fc13cb1c6

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2025

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/ef22600c-fee1-45b5-8cc7-595fc13cb1c6

About this result

Related concepts (31)

Urban heat island

An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak. UHI is most noticeable during the summer and winter. The main cause of the UHI effect is from the modification of land surfaces. A study has shown that heat islands can be affected by proximity to different types of land cover, so that proximity to barren land causes urban land to become hotter and proximity to vegetation makes it cooler.

Oceanic climate

An oceanic climate, also known as a marine climate, is the temperate climate sub-type in Köppen classification represented as Cfb, typical of west coasts in higher middle latitudes of continents, generally featuring cool summers and mild winters (for their latitude), with a relatively narrow annual temperature range and few extremes of temperature. Oceanic climates can be found in both hemispheres generally between 45 and 63 latitude, most notably in northwestern Europe, northwestern America, as well as New Zealand.

Climate

Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them.