Global warming is coming for the countryside

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By Paul Voosen, Science.

Excerpt: The countryside has always been seen as a refuge from the swelter of summer, its leafy shade and lack of concrete often keeping the air at least several degrees cooler than in the city. But now a pioneering study suggests that as global warming continues in much of the world, the countryside’s appeal as a climate buffer may dwindle. Most cities get hotter than their surroundings as their dark asphalt and concrete absorb the Sun’s rays. This urban heat island effect...is the foundational idea for studying warming in cities, and ...it has gotten stronger over the past few decades. Whether the effect will continue has been uncertain because global climate models subdivide the globe into boxes 100 kilometers on a side, too coarse to simulate climate on the scale of cities. The new study, however, relies on a high-resolution model that can resolve cities—and finds they will soon stop warming faster than their surroundings. ...As part of the European Union’s Destination Earth project to forecast the planet’s future, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has developed a high-resolution climate model. Researchers there used it to simulate a greenhouse-warmed world from 2020 to ’50 at a 9-kilometer resolution.... ...The results, published in June in Geophysical Research Letters, led to a surprising conclusion: By 2050, whereas cities on average remained hotter than the countryside nearby, “the rural surroundings of cities warmed up faster,” says Xabier Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia, the study’s lead author.... 

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