Influencia de la isla urbana de calor en la estimación de las tendencias seculares de la temperatura en Argentina subtropical

Abstract

The urban-rural difference of mean annual temperatures in 9 Argentine cities with populations between 20,000 and 8,500,000 inhabitants is analyzed. The distances between urban-rural stations are less than 50 km. Rural data in the plains of Argentina were estimated from the geographic model by Barros and Camilloni (1994). The population dependence of the urban temperature excess is similar to Australia and lower to that found in the United States. The regional temperature trend is 0.2°/100 years for the last century which represents less than half of the trend estimated by Jones et a/.(1991). This difference may be due to a lack of identification of all urban series used by Jones et al. (1991) and to uncorrected data. A negative correlation between mean annual rural temperatures and urban temperature excess is found for Argentine and Australian locations. This may indicate an overestimation of urban warming by some authors. In our region this overestimation could reach 0.1"/100 years in the period of maximum warming (1906-1950).