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Booming Beijing: the impact of urban growth on local environment

Booming Beijing: the impact of urban growth on local environment

The global population is ever-growing. Cities are expanding at a rapid pace. A recent study by Mark Jacobsen of Stanford University and Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory investigated the urban growth of Beijing, China (published on June 15th in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres). Their results showed that the city had quadripled in size in the span of a decade.

This massive increase in the areal extent of the city had a significant impact on the local environment of the city, even if the increased pollution by the inhabitants and vehicles was neglected. The presence of new infrastructure, such as buildings and roads, created a ring of impact around the older parts of the city. This effectively reduced the wind speed in the city, making the air more stagnant, as well as increasing the average winter temperature, leading amongst others to increased ground-level ozone pollution.

Though Beijing is far from the only city in the world experiencing this increase in size, the study illustrates the impact of urbanization on local weather and pollution, even in the absence of other sources of pollution.

Read the full, original post here, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website.

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The EGU welcomes proposals for Topical Meetings, Training Schools and Workshops, as well as applications for EGU Sponsorship of External Meetings, for the year 2016.Successful proposals result in high profile EGU events with financial support.

Proposals for events in 2016 must be submitted by 31 July 2015 only via the online form on the EGU website.

More information about the aims, format and mechanisms of the EGU Topical Events Programme together with application guidelines can be found here.

Flying Colours Fever. Credit: Suzanne Voice (distributed via  imaggeo.egu.eu)

Flying EGU Colours.
Credit: Suzanne Voice (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

ERE is here to stay!

ERE is here to stay!

Hello, welcome, or welcome back!

As of today ERE Matters, the blog of the Energy, Resources and Environment Division has been added to the EGU Blogs family 😀 (we thought about bringing cake, but that turned out to be a logistic distaster…)

For some of you, we are the new kid on the block, but we actually have been around already for a few months! So please, join us for your regular dose of all ERE Matters!

PS. to all our followers (we know who you are!): ERE Matters will remain active for the next year, but this will be our new location as of now, so we didn’t abandon you and we hope you come to visit us here too 🙂

Whodunit?: It was Mankind With the Greenhouse Gases in the Atmosphere

Last week I came across this beautifully illustrated account of what is causing the planet’s rising temperature, based on findings obtained by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. The graphic is designed by Erik Roston and Blacki Migliozzi, in collaboration with Kate Marvel and Gavin Schmidt of NASA-GISS.

Check out the full article What’s really warming the world? on Bloomberg Business

The Late Holocene Fever by Christian Massari (Winner in the EGU Photo Contest 2015; taken from ImagGeo)

The Late Holocene Fever by Christian Massari (Winner in the EGU Photo Contest 2015; taken from ImagGeo)