The impact of global warming trends on urban livability in Malaysia: An analysis

The aim of this investigation is to study the global warming trend in Malaysia and to assess urban temperature variation over the period 1970-2005. Five urban climatology stations were selected and analysed in the course of which several trend analysis tests, namely, the least square regression line, the Kruskall-Wallis test, and the Mann-Kendall test analyses were carried out to detect any significant trend. The most significant results of this investigation were i) a significant change (trend) in urban temperature within 1970-2005; ii) that Kuala Lumpur climatology stations had the highest warming trend with 5.63oC/100 year; and iii) that the trend detection point analysis using Mann-Kendall test did not reveal the change within the onset of the most critical ENSO episode. It was likely that the significant change was related with the impact of the heat island phenomenon in the urban area. Urban surface roughness and heat island phenomenon had been found to be the dominant factors that controlled urban meteorological conditions, changing the onset of extreme weather conditions (such as flash flood and drought) in urban areas.