A Study of the Urban Heat Island in Seoul using Local Analysis System

Abstract

A very high resolution weather analysis system (VHRAS) of 50 m horizontal resolution is established based on LAPS. VHRAS utilizes the 3 hourly forecast data of the Unified Model (UM) of the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) with the horizontal resolution of 12 km as initial guess fields. The analysis system ingests the automatic weather station (AWS) data as input observations. The analysis system operates every hour for Seoul, Korea region in real time basis. It takes less than 10 minutes for one analysis cycle. The size of grid of the analysis domain is 800×660, respectively. The analysis results from December 2010 to February 2011 showed that the mean biases of temperature, maximum and minimum temperature were -0.07, 1.6, 0.2� C, respectively. The temperature in the central part of the city revealed relatively higher value than that of the surrounding mountainous areas, which showed a heat island feature. The heat island appears in zonal direction since the central city region is developed along a large river. Along the heat island, the eastern region was warmer than the western region. The warmer temperature in the western part of the heat island was caused by anthropogenic heat change in conjunction with the change of land use. This system will provide more reliable weather data and information in Seoul.

Vulnerabilities to Temperature Effects on Acute Myocardial Infarction Hospital Admissions in South Korea

“…Hajat et al also showed a greater heat effect on mortality among those living in urban areas, while cold effects were greater in some rural areas [ 20 ]. The heat effect in urban areas is probably due to the heat-island effect, whereby greater heat retention occurs in more heavily built-up areas of large cities, including in South Korea [ 59 ]. Our study did not show a higher risk in the rural population in cold weather, probably because of reduced daily activities in the winter season.…”