Search for: All records

Abstract Global climate changes, especially the rise of global mean temperature due to the increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration, can, in turn, result in higher anthropogenic and biogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This potentially leads to a positive loop of climate–carbon feedback in the Earth’s climate system, which calls for sustainable environmental strategies that can mitigate both heat and carbon emissions, such as urban greening. In this study, we investigate the impact of urban irrigation over green spaces on ambient temperatures and CO₂exchange across major cities in the contiguous United States. Our modeling results indicate that the carbon release from urban ecosystem respiration is reduced by evaporative cooling in humid climate, but promoted in arid/semi-arid regions due to increased soil moisture. The irrigation-induced environmental co-benefit in heat and carbon mitigation is, in general, positively correlated with urban greening fraction and has the potential to help counteract climate–carbon feedback in the built environment. 

Abstract Global climate change has been shown to cause longer, more intense, and frequent heatwaves, of which anthropogenic stressors concentrated in urban areas are a critical contributor. In this study, we investigate the causal interactions during heatwaves across 520 urban sites in the U.S. combining complex network and causal analysis. The presence of regional mediators is manifest in the constructed causal networks, together with long-range teleconnections. More importantly, megacities, such as New York City and Chicago, are causally connected with most of other cities and mediate the structure of urban networks during heatwaves. We also identified a significantly positive correlation between the causality strength and the total populations in megacities. These findings corroborate the contribution of human activities e.g., anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases or waste heat, to urban heatwaves. The emergence of teleconnections and supernodes are informative for the prediction and adaptation to heatwaves under global climate change. 

Abstract. One critical challenge of studying Earth's hydroclimate system, in the face of global environmental changes, is to predict whether the system approaches a critical threshold. Here, we identified the critical transitions of hydrological processes, including precipitation and potential evapotranspiration, by analyzing their early-warning signals and system-based network structures. The statistical early-warning signals are manifest in increasing trends of autocorrelation and variance in the hydrologic system ranging from regional to global scales, prior to climate shifts in the 1970s and 1990s, in agreement with observations. We further extended the conventional statistics-based measures of early-warning signals to system-based network analysis in urban areas across the contiguous United States. The topology of an urban precipitation network features hub-periphery (clustering) and modular organization, with strong intra-regional connectivity and inter-regional gateways (teleconnection). We found that several network parameters (mean correlation coefficient, density, and clustering coefficient) gradually increased prior to the critical transition in the 1990s, signifying the enhanced synchronization among urban precipitation patterns. These topological parameters can not only serve as novel system-based early-warning signals for critical transitions in hydrological processes but also shed new light on structure–dynamic interactions in the complex hydrological system.