Simulation of Regional Climate Change Impacted by Urbanization and Anthropogenic Heat Release in China

Anthropogenic heat release produced from energy use may be an important factor which has an impact on climate change, but currently it is uncertain that how much contribution greenhouse gas, the changes of land surface and anthropogenic heat release gives to global warming respectively. In our study, we collected and analyzed the distribution of the urban anthropogenic heat release with the actual energy consumption and climate observation data in China. Based on the data of urbanization and anthropogenic heat release, the Advanced Research WRF (ARW) model and its urban canopy model (UCM) were used to simulate the influences on regional climate by the change of urban land surface and anthropogenic heat release. In the experiments, the classifications of land use of USGS-24 without urban type and USGS-33 with three urban types are adopted. Considering the large areas of urbanization, the surface air temperature becomes obviously higher over most areas of China than that no change of urban land surface is considered, but the impact is not regular for the precipitation. The latent heat flux generally decreases due to the urbanization. In further, the anthropogenic heat release was added into the model according to the three types of urban classification, and then we can find the temperature continues to increase, but the attitude is smaller than that with the change of urban surface. Therefore, anthropogenic heat release is an unnegligible factor for regional climate change.