The effects of urbanization on the rise of the European temperature since 1960

The effects of urbanization on the rise of the European daily mean temperature is quantified by comparing European averaged temperatures based on all meteorological stations in the European Climate Assessment & Dataset with those based on three subsets of stations: from rural areas, from areas with low growth in urbanization and with stations characterized by relatively low temperature increase. Land cover information is obtained using the CORINE dataset, showing that most stations (75%) have a small percentage (up to 10%) of urban area within a 10 km radius and 81% saw no more than 1% change in urbanization between 1990 and 2006. The results show that urbanization explains 0.0026C/decade of the annual-averaged pan-European temperature trend of 0.179C/decade. This trend has a strong seasonality, being the largest in summer. Averaged over time, the effects of urbanization on the European-averaged temperature has a strong seasonality as well.