There is a pioneering study of the role of landscape processes in weather and climate that should be read by anyone working on this topic. It is directly relevant to the issue of how changes in the landscape alter surface heat and moisture fluxes, and 2m and other near surface temperatures. This paper is
Dabberdt, W.F. and P.A. Davis, 1978: Determination Of Energetic Characteristics Of Urban-Rural Surfaces In The Greater St. Louis Area. Boundary-Layer Meteorology. 14. pages 105-121.
The abstract of this paper reads
The role of surface geographical characteristics (e.g., albedo, thermal admittance, Bowen ratio, roughness) in the partitioning of energy at the complex and heterogeneous surface of several urban and rural land-use types has been evaluated through an application of Lettau’s climatonomy theory. In contrast to the more conventional approach that first specifies all appropriate surface descriptors and then uses them to define climatic features, this application of climatonomy permits the determination of select surface descriptors on the basis of the observed diurnal response of surface temperature to the observed forcing function of available solar energy. Analyses were conducted for a variety of land-use types: urban residential, urban commercial, suburban, and rural farmlands and woods.
The solar forcing function and primary response function (i.e., effective surface temperature) were measured from repetitive diurnal aircraft flights over the greater St. Louis area during clear skies in August 1972. An estimate of surface roughness and subsequent parameterization of the atmospheric sensible heat flux were required for the analyses over nine selected sites. Photosynthetic and anthropogenic fluxes were not considered explicitly. The derived effective thermal admittance (square root of product of heat capacity and thermal conductivity) ranged from a minimum near 20 mly s–1/2 K–1 for urban and suburban sites to about 85 for wooded sections. The derived inverse Bowen ratio (ratio of latent to sensible heat fluxes) ranged from about one in the urban area to more than two for farmland.” [note: last sentence was corrected for typos by Dr. Dabberdt from what was in the published version].
An excerpt from the findings reads
“….[the thermal admittance] ranges from a minimum of 22 mly per second perdegree K in open farm country….to a maximum of about 87
at the wooded sites.”
The landscape they evaluated ranged from farmland, mostly woods to commercial-industrial. Among their results was a greater than 10C difference in daytme maximum surface temperature between urban and rural sites.
This paper documents that major alteration in surface fluxes and of near ground temperatures are substantially altered by urbanization and other landscape changes. It also provides a baseline to compare with the 2009 landscape and to map the HCN sites in this region to these changes.
It provides another reason that the papers
Parker, D. E., 2004: Large scale warming is not urban, Nature, 432, 290.
Parker, D. E., 2006: A demonstration that large-scale warming is not urban, J. Clim., 19, 2882–2895.
Peterson, T. C., 2003: Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found. J. Climate, 16, 2941–2959.
are very suspect in their findings, as they are inconsistent with such observational results as given in Dabberdt and Davis (1978).
Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. 