The Comparison of Climate Change Rates in Rural versus Urban Areas in Tennessee
An analysis of climate data was performed in three counties in Tennessee. The goal of this study is to identify the different rates of climate change in counties of varying urbanization levels. Davidson County, which contains the city of Nashville, is used as the most urban county. Two counties outside Nashville, Sumner and Dickson Counties, are used as a moderately urban county and a rural county, respectively. The level of urbanization was adopted from Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations' Index of Relative Rurality. Yearly average temperature and daily mean temperature for the warm season (May through October) were collected on each county from the years of 1960-2020 via the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University. A Mann-Kendall (MK) trend test was used for each individual county’s data to determine if the series had a monotonic upward trend, meaning overall temperature increase.
The hypothesis of this analysis is that the most urban county will have the highest rate of warming due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. The analysis of the yearly average temperature data for the three counties showed that Davidson and Sumner had higher Sen’s slopes and Kendall’s Taus, which were the prominent factors examined to determine the extent of climate change. Comparatively, Dickson County was found to have a lower Sen’s slope and Kendall’s Tau, which implies a lower overall rate of warming. Significance was found within all the results, since P-values were α
Laina Caywood: Environmental Health, East Tennessee State University.
Ying Li: Environmental Health, East Tennessee State University.
Andrew Joyner: Department of Geosciences, East Tennessee State University.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1943 |
| Date | 06 April 2022 |
| Creators | Caywood, Laina, Li, Ying, Joyner, Andrew |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum & Jay S. Boland Undergraduate Research Symposium |
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