Relationship Between Urbanization and Precipitation in the São Paulo Macrometropolis

The goal of this chapter is to present a bibliographic review of the impacts of urbanization on precipitation, highlighting the causes and consequences. Several studies in the past decades have identified effects of urbanization on precipitation, mainly leading to an increase over the downwind region. Three factors have been recognized as the causes of these impacts: urban heat island, increased surface roughness and air pollution. A complete discussion of observational and modeling studies, addressing these issues is carried out. In the SPMM, the majority of people live in urban areas and heavy rain events with serious consequences for the population are frequent during summer. Some links between urbanization and precipitation increase in the region have already been found in previous studies and are presented here. Finally, a brief discussion about knowledge gaps over the SPMM is made with suggestions for future studies.