Long-Term Warming Trends in Korea and Contribution of Urbanization: An Updated Assessment

Abstract

This study conducted an updated analysis of the long-term temperature trends over South Korea and reassessed the contribution of the urbanization effect to the local warming trends. Linear trends were analyzed for three different periods over South Korea in order to consider possible inhomogeneity due to changes in the number of available stations: recent 103 years (1912–2014), 61 years (1954–2014), and 42 years (1973–2014). The local temperature has increased by 1.90°C, 1.35°C, and 0.99°C during the three periods, respectively, which are found 1.4–2.6 times larger than the global land mean trends. The countries located in the northern middle and high latitudes exhibit similar warming trends (about 1.5 times stronger than the global mean), suggesting a weak influence of urbanization on the local warming over South Korea. Urbanization contribution is assessed using two methods. First, results from “city minus rural” methods showed that 30–45% of the local warming trends during recent four decades are likely due to the urbanization effect, depending on station classification methods and analysis periods. Results from an “observation minus reanalysis” method using the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) data sets (v2 and v2c) indicated about 25–30% contribution of the urbanization effect to the local warming trend during the recent six decades. However, the urbanization contribution was estimated as low as 3–11% when considering the century-long period. Our results confirm large uncertainties in the estimation of urbanization contribution when using shorter-term periods and suggest that the urbanization contribution to the century-long warming trends could be much lower.