4.4 Local factors 

Due to the largely spherical shape of the Earth, it stands to reason that it receives unequal amounts of heat energy from the Sun across such a large spatial scale. However, the global-scale temperature regime is made even more nonlinear and inconsistent across several regions due to the influence of local meteorological and climatological controls over smaller-scale areas.
Local variations in topography are well known to exert significant control over, and bring about distortions in, small-scale temperature regimes over given locations (Zhu et al., 2021), which presents an obstacle in calculating the true values for surface air temperature. This observational gap in data may be evidently shown by separate stations as far apart as 3km given sufficient altitudinal differences (Zhu et al., 2021). The potential for trees to influence air flow and precipitation patterns brings to attention the land-use cover and change (LUCC) regime of the specified area. Research conducted by Li et al. (2023) demonstrates the cooling effect of reforestation efforts, with areas of grassland-to-forest conversion displaying lower daily maximum surface temperatures in summer and autumn over reforested areas of southern China. The degree of continentality (distance from the sea or ocean) of a given area must also be considered. Locations at a closer proximity to the coast are shown to experience variations in temperature in lesser magnitude than locations found in inland environments, due to the faster rate of temperature change observed in continental rock in comparison to the ocean, resulting in general decrease in land-surface temperature in areas closer to the ocean (Ning et al., 2018). This factor can result in temperature regimes that are inconsistent with the latitudinal location of a given region: for example,  the cities of Glasgow and Moscow are located at similar latitudes, but the location of the former city closer to the coast results in milder, warmer winters than that of the latter (BBC, n.d.).