Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the 2020 Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR) in the Contiguous USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the emergence of COVID-19, nations around the world implemented effective restrictions that limited people’s movements and economic activity, which reportedly led to environmental improvements. The lowering of air emissions is one environmental indicator that has been connected to the pandemic. The diurnal temperature range (DTR) is one environmental indicator that has been linked to air pollution. In this study, it was hypothesized that because of the pandemic restrictions and slowdowns, the DTR in 2020 for a country that implemented major restrictive measures in reaction to the pandemic would be higher than in previous years, despite or in addition to background climatic forcings. Based on information from weather stations in the contiguous United States of America (USA), the DTR for the year 2020 was compared to the five years before it as a test of this hypothesis. It was verified that the annual mean DTR of 2020 was higher than the three years prior (2017–2019), but lower than the DTR of 2015 and 2016. Compared to historical trends (since 1911), the DTR change in 2020 is within past mean DTR variations that occurred over approx. 12-year cycles, linked to sunspot activity (Schwabe solar cycle). Moreover, climatic effects such as El Niño, La Niña and the prolonged trend of global warming reduce the confidence in the perceived effect of the pandemic. To determine if or how anthropogenic and environmental factors can magnify the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions on the regional mean DTR, five other parameters (annual snowfall quantities, gross domestic product per capita, population density, latitude (northern/southern), and longitude (coastal/inner)) were also examined against changes in DTR from 2015 to 2020. This analysis pointed to the environmental and industrial factors being more strongly correlated with short-term climate changes than societal factors and geographical location.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".