Related papers: Evolution of urban areas and land surface temperat…
The global mean surface temperature is widely studied to monitor climate change. A current debate centers around whether there has been a recent (post-1970s) surge/acceleration in the warming rate. This paper addresses whether an…
Cities are characterized by the presence of a dense population with a high potential for interactions between individuals of diverse backgrounds. They appear in parallel to the Neolithic revolution a few millennia ago. The advantages…
Understanding the relationship between spatial structures of cities and environmental hazard exposures (such as urban heat) is essential for urban health and sustainability planning. However, a critical knowledge gap exists in terms of the…
The process of urbanization is one of the most important phenomenon of our societies and it is only recently that the availability of massive amounts of geolocalized historical data allows us to address quantitatively some of its features.…
There is continuing interest in the investigation of change in temperature over space and time. We offer a set of tools to illuminate such change temporally, at desired temporal resolution, and spatially, according to region of interest,…
A city (or an urban cluster) is not an isolated spatial unit, but a combination of areas with closely linked socio-economic activities. However, so far, we lack a consistent and quantitative approach to define multi-level urban clusters…
Migration plays a crucial role in urban growth. Over time, individuals opting to relocate led to vast metropolises like London and Paris during the Industrial Revolution, Shanghai and Karachi during the last decades and thousands of smaller…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
While the warming trends of the Earth's mean temperature are evident at climatological scales, the local temperature at shorter timescales are highly fluctuating. In this letter we show that the probabilities of such fluctuations are…
Rotation has a number of important effects on the evolution of stars. Apart from structural changes because of the centrifugal force, turbulent mixing and meridional circulation caused by rotation can dramatically affect a star's chemical…
Rapid changes in climatic conditions threaten both socioeconomic and ecological systems, as these might not be able to adapt or to migrate at the same pace as that of global warming. In particular, an increase of weather and climate…
In the last decades, the notion that cities are in a state of equilibrium with a centralised organisation has given place to the viewpoint of cities in disequilibrium and organised from bottom to up. In this perspective, cities are evolving…
This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of…
A thermodynamic device placed outdoors, or a local ecosystem, is subject to a variety of different temperatures given by short-tem (daily) and long-term (seasonal) variations. In the long term a superstatistical description makes sense,…
Evidences are presented concerning tantalizing regularities in cities' population-flows in what regards to space and time correlations. The former exhibit a distance-behavior (for large distances) compatible with the inverse square law,…
Predicting urban growth is important for practical reasons, and also for the challenge it presents to theoretical frameworks for cluster dynamics. Recently, the model of diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) has been applied to describe urban…
Urban areas are a high-stake target of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. To understand, predict and improve the energy performance of cities, the scientific community develops numerical models that describe how they…
Understanding the spatiotemporal distribution of people within a city is crucial to many planning applications. Obtaining data to create required knowledge, currently involves costly survey methods. At the same time ubiquitous mobile…
Quantifying the spatial organization of human settlements is fundamental to understanding the complexity of urban systems. However, the quantitative patterns of the distribution of villages, towns, and cities that lie between random and…
Earth's climate can be understood as a dynamical system that changes due to external forcing and internal couplings. Essential climate variables, such as surface air temperature, describe this dynamics. Our current interglacial, the…