Urban impacts on mean and trend of surface incident solar radiation

Abstract Anthropogenic aerosols over urban areas may have important effects on surface incident solar radiation ( R s ). Studies have claimed that R s decreased significantly more in urban areas than in rural areas from 1964 to 1989. However, these estimates have substantial biases because they ignored the spatial inhomogeneity of R s measurements. To address this issue, we selected urban-rural station pairs collocated within 2°2° and found 105 such pairs based on the Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA). On average, the impact of urban aerosols on mean and trend of R s is 0.2(0.7, median)11.2 W m -2 and 0.1(-0.7, median)6.6 W m -2 per decade from 1961 to 1990, respectively. Hence the averaged urban impacts on the mean and trend of R s averaged over Europe, China and Japan from 1961 to 1990 are small although they may be significant at specific sites. Key Points: (1) Urbanization has small impacts on mean and trend of surface solar radiation (2) Our estimates are based on urban-rural station pairs (3) Previous estimates include substantial spatial biases

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