| Summary: | Abstract Urban buildings and parks play an important role in regulating urban climate and ecosystem services. Diurnal air temperature range (DTRa) of rocklike buildings is commonsensically regarded as higher due to no latent heat from evapotranspiration and its smaller thermal inertia compared to wet soil. Therefore, the building DTRa is supposed to be higher than that of parks due to its building fabric. However, we found an opposite phenomenon (smaller building DTRa than that of parks), and the underlying mechanisms explaining this phenomenon are unclear. Here we conducted, in Beijing (China), a long‐term observational campaign of standard meteorological variables and radiation/energy fluxes to provide a new valuable evidence (a part of external energy) to explain this phenomenon. The observations indicated external heat energies from horizontal advection and anthropogenic heat sources. We found a significantly lower building DTRa than that of parks (ΔDTRa =2.53±1.93 °C), with a maximum difference of 3.54±1.96 °C in autumn; which was mainly attributed to higher daily minimum air temperature. We also found the large differences in air temperature contribution between the buildings and the parks happened mainly at night. The external heat sources of the building contributed 16.71% to the nighttime air temperature, which was higher than that of the parks (8.39%). The more indoor and outdoor anthropogenic heat sources in the building footprints were the major cause of the slower decrease in Tmin. The comparison between buildings and parks can be extensively applied to analyzing the effects of urbanization on climate.
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