The Urban Heat Footprint (UHF)—a new unified climatic and statistical framework for urban warming

• Published in: Theoretical and applied climatology Vol. 140; no. 1-2; pp. 359 - 374
• Main Authors: Nevat, Ido, Mughal, M. O., Li, Xian-Xiang, Philipp, Conrad H., Aydt, Heiko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vienna Springer Vienna 01.04.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Anthropogenic factors; Aquatic Pollution; Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution; Atmospheric Sciences; Climate effects; Climate models; Climate science; Climatology; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Footprints; Frameworks; Human influences; Man-induced effects; Mathematical models; Modelling; Original Paper; Statistical analysis; Statistical models; Stochastic processes; Waste Water Technology; Water Management; Water Pollution Control; Weather forecasting; Urban Heat Footprint (UHF); Climate model; Anthropogenic effects
• ISSN: 0177-798X; 1434-4483
• DOI: 10.1007/s00704-019-03044-y

In this paper we combine statistical modelling and climate models in order to develop a unified statistical framework for quantifying the Urban Heat Footprint (UHF) effect, thus quantifying the urban warming phenomenon. The UHF quantifies the urban warming at any location in the spatio-temporal domain due to different effects, such as anthropogenic effects and climatic effects. These effects can be controlled and configured by our modelling approach, thus allowing the evaluation of different scenarios of interest. We first provide a definition of UHF followed by definitions of the Anthropogenic Effects (AE) components. Then, based on those definitions, we define the fundamental quantity of UHF spatial-temporal stochastic (random) processes. Next, we propose several metrics for quantifying and summarising the UHF, which are statistical estimators. These provide insightful summaries of the population parameters of the UHF stochastic process, and can be easily calculated in practice. To illustrate how our framework can be used, we utilise a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and provide detailed examples of various UHF metrics, based on real data of Singapore.