Comprehensive Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Travel Climate Comfort Degree and Rainstorm-Flood Disaster Risk in the China–Russia Border Region

Abstract

Infrastructure and tourism is gradually increasing along the China–Russia border with the development of the China–Mongolia–Russia economic corridor. Facing the issues of thermal comfort and rainstorm-flood risk in the neighborhood area between China and Russia, we constructed homologous evaluation models to analyze spatial regularity and internal variations of their effect. Among the results, approximately 55% of the area was classified into the categories of “comfort” and “high comfort” in summer. Oppositely, the situation of most areas in winter corresponds to physical discomfort. On the other hand, the high-risk area of rainstorm-flood in spring and summer is principally located in the northern and southern regions, respectively, while this is further expanded in autumn. After that, the risk level turns to medium and low. Subsequently, a comprehensive assessment coordinate system of the two results was constructed to identify the distribution pattern of a seasonal suitable area for traveling in binary ways. The evaluation shows that Great Khingan Range in the north-western Heilongjiang province is the preferable place among most of seasons, especially in summer. While on the Russian side, the corresponding area is mainly spread over its southern coastal cities. The study is expected to provide recommendations for reasonable year-round travel time, space selection, and risk decision support for millions of people traveling between China and Russia.

Spatio-Temporal Evolution and Prediction of Tourism Comprehensive Climate Comfort in Henan Province, China

“…The change of the TCCI in tourist destinations is influenced by many factors, including the mean temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind speed, etc., which in addition to the climate parameters used to quantify the index, are also affected by factors such as the location of tourist destinations, altitude, vegetation, cloud cover, etc. Therefore, studies have increasingly also considered these factors in the process of evaluating climate comfort [12,30,59,60]. In our study, the hierarchical classification method was used to classify the climate comfort of all stations in the study area, and the classification results were very similar to those based on different altitude gradients (Figure 7; Table 2).…”

“…The research on climate comfort evaluation has produced more than 160 evaluation indices in the past 50 years, including the physiological equivalent temperature (PET) [18,19], Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) [20,21], Climate-Tourism/Transfer-Information Scheme (CTIS) [22,23], and Tourism Climate Index [24,25]. These indexes have their own limitations; they do not all take into account the adaptation of the human body to the environment [26][27][28], include an incomplete consideration of meteorological factors [29,30], or the clothing problem for tourists is not considered [31][32][33]. These problems have a significant impact on the authenticity of the evaluation results.…”

“…In China, the research on climate comfort has developed rapidly, including the evaluation and analysis of the whole country [36], provinces [30], and at the city scale [9], as well as research on scenic spots [37]. For the research on climate comfort, a few studies have used the THI, WEI, and ICL, but never all three in the same study.…”

“…For the research on climate comfort, a few studies have used the THI, WEI, and ICL, but never all three in the same study. For example, in the evaluation of climate comfort in different living environments based on age in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China, only the THI and WEI [38] were utilized, and only the first two indices [30] were used in a comprehensive space-time travel analysis of climate comfort on the Sino-Russian border. These studies only show the time and space of climate comfort results, and seldom explore the main controlling climate factors and their driving factors that affect their evolution.…”