Impacts of Urbanization on Variations of Extreme Precipitation over the Yangtze River Delta

Abstract

The urbanization process is the hallmark of the population’s economic activities and land-use types, including population-, economic-, and landscape-urbanization. The question of how to classify the stations into urbanized and suburbanized stations is important for detecting the contribution rates of urbanization to precipitation extremes. This study used the fuzzy c-means clustering method to classify different urbanized level stations by population, economy, and impervious surface in the Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou urban agglomeration. Based on the change trends of six extreme precipitation indices, the contribution rates of urbanization to the precipitation extremes were estimated. The results show that the increasing indices were the intensity indices, while the decreasing indices were the duration indices during 1980–2015. Moreover, high urbanization tended to have a higher contribution to the most extreme precipitation indices, especially the intensity indices, than urbanization in the medium-size cities, indicating the urbanization leads to the phenomenon of extreme precipitation enhancement. The results of the three kinds of classification methods were different, especially the classification by the impervious area. This paper investigated the spatiotemporal changes in precipitation extremes and the contribution of urbanization to extreme precipitation, which will provide support for the development of urban agglomeration in the future.