Impacts of Urbanization on Precipitation in Taihu Lake Basin, China
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 4
Abstract
Taking Suxichang and Hangjiahu urban agglomerations in Taihu Lake Basin as study areas, the authors explore differences in annual precipitation, flood season precipitation, annual maximum daily precipitation, and rainfall days of different types between cities and suburbs from 1961 to 2006. The authors also investigate the trends of precipitation change by means of Mann-Kendall test and rescaled range analysis. The results show that the amount of precipitation increased with the level of urbanization at spatial and temporal scales. The maximum daily precipitation and the number of rainstorms in urban areas also increased. With further development of urbanization, the increase would continue in the future. The two urban agglomerations with similar level of urbanization and climatic conditions are consistent in terms of all research indicators applied in this paper. The results are basically consistent with many previous studies, while the study area has its own characteristics in that the maximum rainfall generally happened after the plum rains, and that rainstorms often occurred later than they did in other regions. The results above suggest that urbanization has an effect on precipitation, and this is a matter of concern for the cities located in the East Asian Monsoon Region with its heavy rainfall.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. They also wish to thank Juan Cai, Jinjia Ding, and Mingjing Yu, who have made great contributions to this study. This research work is financially supported by the key program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 40730635), the Commonweal and Specialized Program for Scientific Research, and the Ministry of Water Resources of China (Grant No. 201201072, 201301075).
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 4 • April 2014
Pages: 739 - 746
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 23, 2012
Accepted: May 27, 2013
Published online: May 30, 2013
Discussion open until: Oct 30, 2013
Published in print: Apr 1, 2014
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