Indian cities could see far higher temperature rise than projected, says study

Climate models may be underestimating — by anything from half to two degrees — how much hotter India’s non-metropolitan cities can get from global warming relative to rural areas, according to a study published Wednesday (February 4, 2026).

The researchers, from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, analysed how temperatures would rise in 104 “medium-sized” cities in tropical and sub-tropical regions under a 2°C warming scenario, the emissions path that the globe is currently on. Rather than asking how hot regions become on average, the study asks a different question: how much faster do cities warm than their surrounding countryside?

For instance, it found that in Patiala, Punjab, land surface temperatures could rise at double the rate of warming projected by global climate models in comparison to its surrounding rural region — an extreme “outlier.” Karur, in Pakistan, was the only other place in the researchers’ analysis that showed as much differential warming. This means that if the models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessments predict a 2°C temperature rise in Patiala, the rise would actually be 4°C when urban heat-island effects are accounted for. An extra 2°C rise in temperature can have significant implications for susceptibility to heat strokes, water availability, and public expenditure on cooling.

Urban heat island effect

The study includes 18 Indian cities and finds that all of them warm faster than nearby rural areas. On average, Indian cities experience about 45% more warming than what Earth System Models (ESMs) project for the broader region. In practical terms, this raises expected city warming from about 2.2°C, as suggested by climate models alone, to roughly 2.6-2.7 °C once urban-specific effects are included. The urban heat island effect is the tendency for cities to be hotter than nearby rural land.

In the three largest cities by population, the greatest changes are seen in Jalandhar (India), Fuyang (China), and Kirkuk (Iraq), which experience 0.7-0.8°C additional change in temperature compared to their rural surroundings.

However, other cities experience significantly greater warming, for example, Asyut (Egypt), and Shangqui (China), which experience 1.5-2°C additional change, which is up to 100% more than their hinterlands.

Coarse resolution masks differences

This difference, according to the report published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not because climate models underestimate regional warming but the degree to which models operating at coarse resolution can miss the differences in urban and rural land surfaces’ response to climate change. In most climate models used by the IPCC, cities are effectively blended into their surroundings, masking variations in urban and rural landscapes.

The researchers measured these variations by combining satellite observations of land surface temperature from 2002 to 2020 with a machine-learning model. The model ‘learns’ how physical factors — particularly urban–rural differences in vegetation, moisture, and albedo (the proportion of solar heat reflected away from the ground) — control the surface urban heat island today. The authors then applied projected changes in these variables to estimate how the urban heat island itself evolves in a 2°C warmer world.

The dominant driver is vegetation-driven cooling of rural areas. In north India, climate models project increases in moisture and vegetation productivity in the countryside. Vegetated rural land cools efficiently through evapotranspiration, while cities, dominated by impervious surfaces and engineered drainage, cannot benefit to the same extent. As a result, rural areas cool or warm more slowly, and the temperature gap between cities and villages widens.

“Urban heat stress under climate change is an increasing concern, as many cities in the tropics and subtropics can be warmer than their rural surroundings, heightening their vulnerability to rising temperatures,” co-author Manoj Joshi, from the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, said in a statement, “Our results suggest that several cities in North-East China and northern India are projected to warm by 3°C, despite Earth System Model projections of their hinterlands showing a warming of 1.5-2°C.”