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2024-08-07 19:00
The increasing move of people into cities is creating warmer and drier urban environments that suppress light rainfall and aggravate extreme local drought conditions, according to Chinese research. The research found that over half of the world’s cities showed increasing measures of drought with urbanisation although South East Queensland cities were one of the few places that bucked the global trends and showed decreasing drought severity with urbanisation. The research found that large cities and those with less green cover are likely to have experienced even greater worsening of drought. The researchers also looked specifically at the greater Sydney area and found that there had been a worsening of drought severity due to urbanisation.
Journal/conference: Nature Cities
Link to research (DOI): 10.1038/s44284-024-00102-z
Organisation/s: Wuhan University, China
Funder: N.C. acknowledges financial support from the Special Fund of
Hubei Luojia Laboratory (grant no. 220100034) and the National
Natural Science Foundation of China program (grant nos. 41890822,
41801339). C.W. acknowledges financial support from the National
Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no.
2023YFC3209101), the Key R&D Program of Hubei Province (grant
no. 2022BAA048), the National Nature Science Foundation of China
Program (grant no. 42371101), the CRSRI Open Research Program
(Program SN: grant no. CKWV20231198/KY) and the Open Fund of
National Engineering Research Center for Geographic Information
System, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
(grant no. 2022KFJJ07). X.Z. acknowledges financial support from the
Open Fund of Hubei Luojia Laboratory (grant no. 220100059) and
the Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Hydrometeorological Disaster
Mechanism and Warning of Ministry of Water Resources (grant no.
HYMED202302). S.W. acknowledges support from the Natural Science
Foundation of Hubei Province of China (grant no. 2024AFB061). D.E.H.
acknowledges support from the U.S. National Science Foundation
PREEVENTS (grant no. 1854951). D. N. acknowledges William Stamps
Farish Chair endowment from the Jackson School of Geosciences,
University of Texas at Austin, and US National Science Foundation award #2413827 (Extreme Summer Urban Rainfall Modification under
Urban Expansion in a Changing Climate). The numerical calculations
in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the
Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.
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