Climate Change to Broil Cities

Cities’ ability to store heat means they are typically warmer than their surrounding areas. Given climate change, this could mean the end of cooler nights and more frequent heat waves. “Instead of being consumed by plants or transported away by soil moisture, much of the daytime heat directed into urban areas is absorbed by hard, impermeable surfaces that have no other way of releasing their stored heat except to re-radiate it at night. This gives residents of urban areas little relief from the summer heat long after the sun sets…This stored heat will only get worse with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, said Mark McCarthy, lead author and a research scientist with the Climate Impacts team at the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s weather service.”