ERE
Energy, Resources and the Environment

Energy, Resources and the Environment

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

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

Towards observation-based gridded runoff estimates for Europe

Words on Wednesday aims at promoting interesting/fun/exciting publications on topics related to Energy, Resources and the Environment. If you would like to be featured on WoW, please send us a link of the paper, or your own post, at ERE.Matters@gmail.com.

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Gudmundsson, L. and Seneviratne, S. I.: Towards observation-based gridded runoff estimates for Europe, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 19, 2859-2879, doi:10.5194/hess-19-2859-2015, 2015. http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/19/2859/2015/hess-19-2859-2015.html

Abstract:

Terrestrial water variables are the key to understanding ecosystem processes, feed back on weather and climate, and are a prerequisite for human activities. To provide context for local investigations and to better understand phenomena that only emerge at large spatial scales, reliable information on continental-scale freshwater dynamics is necessary. To date streamflow is among the best-observed variables of terrestrial water systems. However, observation networks have a limited station density and often incomplete temporal coverage, limiting investigations to locations and times with observations. This paper presents a methodology to estimate continental-scale runoff on a 0.5° spatial grid with monthly resolution. The methodology is based on statistical upscaling of observed streamflow from small catchments in Europe and exploits readily available gridded atmospheric forcing data combined with the capability of machine learning techniques. The resulting runoff estimates are validated against (1) runoff from small catchments that were not used for model training, (2) river discharge from nine continental-scale river basins and (3) independent estimates of long-term mean evapotranspiration at the pan-European scale. In addition it is shown that the produced gridded runoff compares on average better to observations than a multi-model ensemble of comprehensive land surface models (LSMs), making it an ideal candidate for model evaluation and model development. In particular, the presented machine learning approach may help determining which factors are most relevant for an efficient modelling of runoff at regional scales. Finally, the resulting data product is used to derive a comprehensive runoff climatology for Europe and its potential for drought monitoring is illustrated.

Gudmundsson 2015 Fig

 

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 🙂