著者

Fumiaki Fujibe

出版者

Meteorological Society of Japan

雑誌

SOLA (ISSN:13496476)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.2020-030, (Released:2020-08-25)

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Japan underwent a nationwide self-restraint of human activities in spring 2020 to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 infection. In order to evaluate the effect of suppressed human activities on temperature in the Tokyo Metropolitan area, a statistical analysis was made for temperature anomalies during the self-restraint period using hourly data on the AMeDAS network. The temperature anomaly was defined by the departure from the value that would have been observed without self-restraint, estimated from regression analysis for temperatures at surrounding non-urban stations. It was found that the temperature in central Tokyo (Kitanomaru Park) had a negative anomaly of −0.49°C with a 95% confidence range of ±0.19°C on the average over the strong self-restraint period from April to May. The anomaly was larger in the nighttime than in the daytime, and was found in an area spreading for several tens of kilometers, with a decreasing magnitude according to the distance from Tokyo. These facts indicate a possibility that the reduction of anthropogenic heat release during the self-restraint period resulted in substantial decrease of temperature in the Tokyo Metropolitan area.