The shape of a city can influence the amount of rainfall it gets, because circular cities are better at mixing air fronts together
The Dallas skyline
Charl Folscher/Getty Images
Circular cities have more rain than square cities, and triangular cities have the least rain of all – a finding from a modelling study that could help urban planners tackle the effects of climate change.
Dev Niyogi at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues decided to investigate the link between the shape of an urban area and its rainfall after noticing that weather data from roughly circular cities such as Dallas and London often show more rain than triangular cities such as Chicago and Los …