Urban Stream Temperature Surge—Streamwater Temperature Variability after Rainfall in Suceava City Metropolitan Area

Andrei-Emil Briciu (), Dumitru Mihăilă, Dinu Iulian Oprea and Alin Prisăcariu
Additional contact information
Andrei-Emil Briciu: Department of Geography, Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania
Dumitru Mihăilă: Department of Geography, Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania
Dinu Iulian Oprea: Department of Geography, Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania
Alin Prisăcariu: Department of Geography, Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 10, 1-22

Abstract: Suceava city is a territory under the urban heat island effect that leads to warm runoffs into small urban streamwaters that are highly impacted by the thermal pollution due to a combination of the small stream discharge and important runoff from impervious urban surfaces. This research detects the frequency and specificities of temperature surges in the Suceava city metropolitan area–40 surges were certainly identified in ~2 years-long time series. We analyzed the diurnal cycles of the stream temperature and correlated the atmospheric precipitation with some heated surface runoffs that resulted in aperiodic increases in the stream temperature. The high variability of rainfalls in the urban area meant that the stream temperature surges occurred rarely in all streams during the same rainfall event, despite the small distances between the watersheds (1–5 km between adjacent water monitoring points). The surges lasted up to 10 h and had an amplitude of up to 5.2 °C; they usually lasted 3.9–5.6 h after 5.8–7.7 mm rainfalls, causing temperature peaks of 0.5–1.4 °C. Additionally, they were easier to detect in the Cetăţii Creek due to its colder-than-natural waters during the warm season—a result of important wastewater discharge. Overall, the surges occurred mostly during the warm and wet semester of the year (87.5%) and especially during the summer (50%). Because Suceava is an average Romanian city, our findings could be taken into account as relevant data at least for cities located in the Moldavian Plateau.

Keywords: urban heat island; time lag; thermal pollution; urban tributary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/10/7882/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/10/7882/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:10:p:7882-:d:1144664

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().