Comment on "Surface urban heat island across 419 global big cities"

Dominant control of agriculture and irrigation on urban heat island in India

As is true in many regions, India experiences surface Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect that is well understood, but the causes of the more recently discovered Urban Cool Island (UCI) effect remain poorly constrained. This raises questions about our fundamental understanding of the drivers of rural-urban environmental gradients and hinders development of effective strategies for mitigation and adaptation to projected heat stress increases in rapidly urbanizing India. Here we show that more than 60% of Indian urban areas are observed to experience a day-time UCI. We use satellite observations and the Community Land Model (CLM) to identify the impact of irrigation and prove for the first time that UCI is caused by lack of vegetation and moisture in non-urban areas relative to cities. In contrast, urban areas in extensively irrigated landscapes generally experience the expected positive UHI effect. At night, UHI warming intensifies, occurring across a majority (90%) of India's urban areas. The magnitude of rural-urban temperature contrasts is largely controlled by agriculture and moisture availability from irrigation, but further analysis of model results indicate an important role for atmospheric aerosols. Thus both land-use decisions and aerosols are important factors governing, modulating, and even reversing the expected urban-rural temperature gradients.

Long-term evolution of anthropogenic heat fluxes into a subsurface urban heat island

Anthropogenic alterations in urban areas influence the thermal environment causing elevated atmospheric and subsurface temperatures. The subsurface urban heat island effect is observed in several cities. Often shallow urban aquifers exist with thermal anomalies that spread laterally and vertically, resulting in the long-term accumulation of heat. In this study, we develop an analytical heat flux model to investigate possible drivers such as increased ground surface temperatures (GSTs) at artificial surfaces and heat losses from basements of buildings, sewage systems, subsurface district heating networks, and reinjection of thermal wastewater. By modeling the anthropogenic heat flux into the subsurface of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1977 and 2011, we evaluate long-term trends in the heat flux processes. It revealed that elevated GST and heat loss from basements are dominant factors in the heat anomalies. The average total urban heat flux into the shallow aquifer in Karlsruhe was found to be ∼759 ± 89 mW/m(2) in 1977 and 828 ± 143 mW/m(2) in 2011, which represents an annual energy gain of around 1.0 × 10(15) J. However, the amount of thermal energy originating from the individual heat flux processes has changed significantly over the past three decades.