Satellite LST can overcome these difficulties to some degree. Another complication is that in-situ paired observations of SAT are unavailable for the majority of global cities. One concern here is that limited urban stations are difficult to provide sufficient spatial details for complex urban neighborhoods 14, 23. The largest SAT-based nighttime UHI trends of around 0.40 K decade −1 have been observed for megacities such as London, Osaka, and Shanghai 22. The SAT-based UHI intensity trends have been reported for individual cities and city clusters in single regions 19, 20 and for selected cities across different regions of the world 21, 22. A non-zero UHI intensity trend would indicate that urban and rural temperatures are changing at different rates. Other studies have examined the urban warming signal by comparing temperature observations in urban areas with those observed in rural surroundings or those retrieved from reanalysis data 17, 18. It is not known if the results of these studies can be extended to other geographic regions. ![]() Furthermore, previous reports of urban warming derived from urban–rural temperature differences typically represent the characteristics of the stations located at a local scale 16. The inhomogeneities in SAT series could directly affect urban–rural differences in SAT trend and thus bias the estimation of urban warming trend 14, 16. For example, a previous investigation of urban warming in China indicates stations that suffered from inhomogeneities (e.g., changes in observation instrument, site, and time, as well as the urbanization effect) account for about a half of the total stations 14. This is primarily because most of these urban stations were initially installed over rural surfaces, while they became ‘true’ urban ones when they are gradually engulfed by built-up areas due to rapid urbanization, especially in developing countries such as China 14, 15, 16. Urban stations used in previous urban warming studies were mostly located in urban fringes (i.e., newly urbanized areas) rather than located in urban cores. However, these studies focused more on urbanization contribution to regional warming rather than on warming within cities. ![]() It is estimated that urbanization-induced warming accounts for 20% to 50% of the overall observed warming in areas that have experienced fast urbanization 13, 14. This approach has been applied to China where rapid urbanization has occurred in the past decades and where the density of weather station network is high 13. Some studies have examined the equal-rate assumption by isolating the urban warming signal from surface air temperature (SAT) data, i.e., by directly separating contributions of urbanization from other forcing factors based on linear or non-linear models 11, 12. Furthermore, although the urban effect has been considered in projections of heat exposure in the future 9, many studies make an implicit assumption that urban temperatures will increase at an equal-rate as rural temperatures 6, 10. ![]() Despite the prevalence of the UHI and the increasing recognition of the need for climate monitoring in urban environments 3, a great majority of the assessments of heat-related mortality 6 and loss of workplace productivity 7 in cities are still based on temperature data collected by non-urban and peri-urban weather stations 8. This problem will become more severe in the future because of global climate change and urban population growth in cities 4, 5. Urban residents can experience greater heat exposure during heatwave events than the general population because of the urban heat island (UHI) 1, 2, the phenomenon of higher temperatures over urban land than over the surrounding rural land 3.
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