A Dynamic Method for Quantifying Natural Warming in Urban Areas

In the study of global warming, one of the main issues is the quantification of the urbanization effect in climate records. Previous studies have contributed much to removing the impact of urbanization from surface air temperature by carefully selecting reference stations. However, due to the insufficient number of stations free from the influence of urbanization and the different criteria used to select reference stations, there are still significant controversies about the intensity of the impact of urbanization on temperature records. This study proposes a dynamic method for quantifying natural warming using information on urbanization from every station acquired from remote sensing (RS) data instead of selecting reference stations. Two different spatial scales were applied to examine the impact of urbanization, but little difference was found, indicating the stability of this method. The results showed a significant difference in original temperature data and the homogenized data—urban warming accounted for approximately 64% in the original temperature warming but only approximately 20% in the homogenized temperature records.