Abstract

By using in situ daily observations in East China during 1961–2007 and NCEP reanalysis data, the methods of statistical analyses, urban minus rural and observation minus reanalysis, it is revealed that the observed climate change and surface warming in East China were mainly induced by urbanization. The results show that East China has experienced two warmer periods of 1930s and 1980s in the past century, from 1951 to 2007, the regional mean temperature increased at a rate of 0.14°C per decade, heat waves happened in urban center more frequently, and local climate showed a warming and dry trend, there was no significant linear trend in regional mean precipitation in the past 50 years. Urbanization was a crucial element for the regional warming, about 44% of the warming was due to heat island effect in the mega city. Hou, Y.-L., B.-D. Chen, X.-C. Yang, et al., 2013: Observed climate change in East China during 1961–2007. Adv. Clim. Change Res., 4 (2), doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1248.2013.084.

Abstract

This paper evaluates the Technical Efficiencies (TEs) of a group of airports in East China by applying a three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. The merit of this method allows us to consider the impact of the environmental factors on measuring airport efficiencies. Three variables, i.e. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the proportion of the tertiary industry, and the number of tourists, are used to represent the environmental factors. The results show that the environmental factors have airport-specific impacts on the value of the efficiencies. Additionally, airport TE are dominated by both Pure Technical Efficiency (PTE) and Scale Efficiency (SE). Based on empirical results, airport specific strategies can be provided to enhance airport efficiency, such as taking the effects of environmental variables and the statistical noise into consideration when analysing the airport efficiency, improving airport efficiencies according to their own conditions and improving the PTE or SE according to their categorizations. Document type: Article