Augmenting the spatial resolution of climate-change temperature projections for city planners and local decision makers
With the forecast of 6.3 billion persons living in urban areas by 2050, it is expected that problems associated with the use of natural resources and the negative externalities of anthropogenic activity will become increasingly relevant. From the point of view of climate studies, this context highlights the need for downscaling methods and procedures in order to accurately assess and depict scenarios for climate change (CC) at urban/local scales of 12.5–50 km and below. In the urban areas, especially, where more than 60% of the global population lives, CC will pose increasing and escalating challenges that will affect safety, health and mobility aspects of the human routine. For this reason, CC studies at local scales are becoming pivotal, with a focus on land-use and land-change planning.
Structured in four sections, this paper first describes (in section 2) the data used for reducing the resolution scale of dynamic scale reduction projections by Ecuador's Ministry of Environment and Water (MAAE), detailing each of the steps for detecting satellite images' outliers as well as the procedure for approximating surface to air temperature and extrapolation methods of air temperature time series in time ranges from 1981 to 2040. The methods of adjusting the resulting satellite images with the dynamic scale reduction projections by MAAE are validated using local meteorological stations in Portoviejo. Section 3 presents the resulting maps at a resolution of 30 m and section 4 discusses the method in the light of the literature review on CC downscaling scales below 5 km, highlighting a series of recommendations for further application and future research.
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