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Assessing population movement impacts on urban heat island of Beijing during the Chinese New Year holiday: effects of meteorological conditions

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Abstract

Chinese New Year (CNY), or Spring Festival, is the most important of all festivals in China. We use daily observations to show that Beijing’s urban heat island (UHI) effects largely depend on precipitation, cloud cover, and water vapor but are insensitive to wind speed, during the CNY holiday season. Non-precipitating, clear, and low humidity conditions favor strong UHI effects. The CNY holiday, with some 3 billion journeys made, provides a living laboratory to explore the role of population movements in the UHI phenomenon. Averaged over the period 2004–2013, with the Olympic year of 2008 excluded, Beijing’s UHI effects during the CNY week decline by 0.48 °C relative to the background period (4 weeks including 2 to 3 weeks before, and 2 to 3 weeks after, the CNY week). With combined effects of precipitation, large cloud cover, and high water vapor excluded, the UHI effects during the CNY week averaged over the study period decline by 0.76 °C relative to the background period, significant at the 99% confidence level by Student’s t test. These results indicate that the impacts of population movements can be more easily detected when excluding unfavorable meteorological conditions to the UHI. Population movements occur not only during the CNY holiday, but also during all the time across the globe. We suggest that better understanding the role of population movements will offer new insight into anthropogenic climate modifications.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41675085,41275089 and 41305071).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Lingyun Wu

  2. Center for Monsoon System Research, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Jingyong Zhang

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Jingyong Zhang

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  1. Lingyun Wu
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Correspondence to Jingyong Zhang.

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Wu, L., Zhang, J. Assessing population movement impacts on urban heat island of Beijing during the Chinese New Year holiday: effects of meteorological conditions. Theor Appl Climatol 131, 1203–1210 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-017-2043-7

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