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Extreme rainfall trends of 21 typical urban areas in China during 1998–2015 based on remotely sensed data sets

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Abstract

With the increase of population, many cities are growing in size at a phenomenal rate. Urbanization changes the urban underlying surface, influences the micro-climate, and sometimes affects the local precipitation process. In this study, we investigated the trends of extreme rainfall in China’s 21 typical urban areas. Based on a series of daily rainfall and “Urban/built-up” dataset from TMPA 3B42 and MCD12Q1 products in China, trends in extreme precipitation, with the threshold defined as 95th (pre95p) and 99th (pre99p) percentiles of annual rain days during 1998–2015, have been assessed in China, and especially in 21 typical urban areas from 1998 to 2015. The tendency curves in extreme rainfall of different years are presented. In this period, more than 66% regions of China covered by TMPA 3B42 have increasing trends in extreme rainfall with pre95p threshold. The 21 typical urban areas showed different trends—in over half of these areas, upward tendencies in extreme rainfall were observed, particularly in Dalian, Beijing, and Chongqing. Seventeen urban areas showed increasing tendencies in pre95p extreme rainfall days, including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou in the Yangtze River Delta region. The results also illustrate that southeastern coastal urban areas of China may have experienced decreasing occurrences in extreme rainfall.

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Notes

  1. http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov

  2. https://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/collections/TRMM_3B42_daily__007.shtml

  3. https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/

  4. https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/ceres-igbp-land-classification

  5. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov

  6. http://data.cma.cn/en

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41501458 and 41730642), the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (Grant No. 19ZR1437500), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFC0502706), open fund of Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Water and Soil Conservation and Environmental Protection (STKF201902), and the Shanghai Gaofeng & Gaoyuan Project for University Academic Program Development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Urban Studies, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 200234, China

    Weiyue Li & Jun Gao

  2. School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 200234, China

    Weiyue Li, Dongjing Yao & Jun Gao

  3. Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Water and Soil Conservation and Environmental Protection, College of Resources and Environment, Linyi, 276005, China

    Weiyue Li & Min Zhao

  4. Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Marco Scaioni

  5. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Seyed Reza Hosseini

  6. Linyi Natural Resources and Planning Bureau, Linyi, 276001, China

    Xiang Wang

  7. Institute of Tourism, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 200234, China

    Kaihang Zhang

  8. Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xin Li

  9. CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xin Li

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  1. Weiyue Li
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  2. Min Zhao
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  4. Seyed Reza Hosseini
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  9. Xin Li
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Correspondence to Min Zhao.

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Li, W., Zhao, M., Scaioni, M. et al. Extreme rainfall trends of 21 typical urban areas in China during 1998–2015 based on remotely sensed data sets. Environ Monit Assess 191, 709 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-019-7900-7

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