Considering that some global warming investigations are based on historical series of air temperature, a question that should be raised is about the influence of urban heat sources on the weather stations areas. The first approach to answering this question is to verify if different weather stations that are geographically close to each others, show elevation trends starting at the same time, possible related to global radiative forcing. However, if these trends start at quite different period among the several weather stations, the elimination of local radiative forcing as the main responsible for this trend is not possible. The aim of this work was to detect continuous trends in annual minimum air temperature series of six weather stations of the State of São Paulo, Brazil. The initial date of those trends was also evaluated. The series were fitted to the normal distribution. The Mann-Kendall test did not detected elevation trends starting at the same time among the analyzed series. Thus, local radiative forcing seems to be a more important factor, responsible for the average increase of the meteorological variable under investigation, than global radiative forcing. The results also indicate that local factors, such as urbanization influences, have to be evaluated and isolated in global warming or agricultural zoning investigations based on minimum air temperature series of the State of São Paulo, Brazil.
Mann-Kendall test; air temperature urbanization influences; urban heat island
