Impact of Urbanization on Climate Change in Korea, 1973–2002 (Formerly Paper number 12.1)

The most important anthropogenic influences on climate are the emission of greenhouse gases and changes in land use. But it has been difficult to separate these two influences because both tend to increase the daily mean surface temperature in the global warming. The National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) produced the retroactive record of surface temperature data based on more than 50 years of global analyses of atmospheric fields. However, NCEP reanalysis does not include the effects of land surface changes. The objective of this study is to separate the trend of surface temperature of global warming from the urbanization in Korea. The analysis method is to interpolate the gridded NCEP reanalysis temperature to observational daily values in Korea during 30 years from 1973 to 2002. Over the 30-year period, surface air temperature has been increased with time (1.38oC in Seoul as an urban site and 0.43oC in Chupungnyung as a rural site). The temperature trends are shown in good agreements between observations and NCEP reanalysis at the major cities and rural areas and however, decadal trends show some differences between observations and NCEP reanalysis. The analyses have results as that urban area is warming with high increasing temperature rate, and therefore, separated with global warming temperature.