Assessing the effect of land use/land cover change on the change of urban heat island intensity

Abstract

SummaryDue to rapid economic development, China has experienced one of the greatest rates of change in land use=land cover during the last two decades. This change is mainly urban expansion and cultivated land reduction in urban growth regions, both of which play an important role in regional climate change. In this paper, the variation of the urban heat island (UHI) caused by urbanization has been evaluated with an analysis of land use change in China. First, meteorological observation stations were grouped by different land cover types (dry land, paddy field, forest, grassland, water field, urban, rural inhabitable area, industrial and mineral land, and waste land) throughout China. These stations were subdivided into urban and non-urban classes. Then, a new method was proposed to determine the UHI intensity from the difference between the observed and the interpolated air temperature of urban type weather stations. The results indicate that the trends of UHI intensity in different land use change regions are spatially correlated with regional land use and its change pattern. During 1991-2000, the estimated UHI intensity has increased by 0.11 C per decade in the spring and has fluctuated in other seasons throughout China resulting from land use change.

Remote sensing of the surface urban heat island and land architecture in Phoenix, Arizona: Combined effects of land composition and configuration and cadastral–demographic–economic factors

“…The UHI of large cities has increased substantially since the middle of the 20th century (Akbari, Pomerantz, & Taha, 2001;Oke, 1976;Stone, 2007), with urban conglomerations generating modeled and observed changes in regional temperatures (Georgescu, Moustaoui, Mahalov, & Dudhia, 2011;He, Liu, Zhuang, Zhang, & Liu, 2007;Kalnay & Cai, 2003;Li, Wang, Shen, & Song, 2004). Extensively examined, the UHI draws increasing attention owing to its effects on energy and water consumption, human health, environmental (ecosystem) services, especially in the context of global warming (e.g.…”

Urbanization and heterogeneous surface warming in eastern China

“…The key of this method depends on whether or not those sites or stations can be objectively classified. In general, such a classification utilizes either population data [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] or satellite data (such as nighttime light imagery and land cover dataset) [18][19][20][21][22][23] as well as the geographic location of the stations. In addition, Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) [24,25], Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [26,27] and station metadata [28] can also be applied to define reference or rural stations.…”

“…Some previous studies indicated that urbanization has little impact on regional warming [7,13,26,27]. However, recent investigations have suggested that the urbanization process can not only increase the local daily temperature, but also play an essential role in regional climate change [6,9,12,[14][15][16][17][20][21][22][23][24][28][29][30]35,36]. Using the OMR method, Zhou et al [29] and Zhang et al [30] found that the urbanization exerts a significant influence on temperature trends in eastern China.…”

Supporting Global Environmental Change Research: A Review of Trends and Knowledge Gaps in Urban Remote Sensing

“…Numerous studies document the strong relationship between urban land cover classes and elevated land surface temperatures in many different climate settings (see as examples, [49][50][51][52][53]). A unique feature of thermal infrared bands in remotely sensed data is the capability to measure land surface temperatures, and in turn, how these temperatures impact the development of an urban heat island (UHI).…”