Cities affect surrounding temperatures for thousands of miles

phys.org

10 pointssbkirk5 comments

After reading the article I was disappoint to find out this is merely a guess based on the assumption the model they are using is otherwise correct.

Sounds like most of the rest of climate science to me.

If this kind of effect is still being studied, is there some hope that it is correctly compensated when measuring planet temperatures?

From the article, it looks like the known effect is the urban heat island effect, which I assume is modeled correctly when predicting global warming. This new effect has about the same magnitude, but affects a much wider area.

Urban heat island should not have much effect since is is simply re-radiation of energy (mostly solar) that was there already. The new effect is additional heat introduced by burning fuel.

You make a good point. Concentrating the release of energy in a small area in a relatively small time frame is bound to affect temperature surrounding the city for many miles around the city. This heat is distributed through the atmosphere.

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