Quantifying the cool island intensity of urban parks using ASTER and IKONOS data

Building and Environment

et al. 2013

a b s t r a c tThe urban functional zone (UFZ) is the basic unit of urban planning, which is defined as an area of similar social and economic functions. Despite the importance of UFZs, the stability of their annual temperature between winter and summer has seldom been investigated. With an understanding of the thermal impacts that planning decisions can have, it is essential to know how UFZs can be designed to regulate temperatures in the urban environment. 690 UFZs were identified using ALOS images in 2009 in Beijing. Land surface temperature (LST) was extracted from daytime Landsat TM (2002) and ASTER (2009) images. The regional LST variation of 31 district-sized sub-regions was correlated to the types of UFZs in the region and structural features of the region such as area, size, diversity, complexity and connectivity. Results showed that: (1) UFZ types, in order from highest to lowest LST variation, were commercial, campus, high density residential, water, recreational, low density residential, road, preservation, and agricultural zones; (2) the regional LST variation was positively correlated with the area of campus, commercial, high density residential, water, and road zones, but negatively correlated with the area of agricultural and low density residential zones; (3) increased connectivity and complexity decreased regional LST variations. The results indicated that the stability of annual temperatures was determined not only by the UFZ type and size but also by the connectivity and complexity. These results are clearly useful and essential pieces of information that can be applied in urban planning to improve climate adaptability.Crown

Section: Major Factors Responsible For Ufz's Temperature Stabilitymentioning

confidence: 52%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the stability of annual temperatures for different urban functional zones

Sun

Building and Environment

et al. 2013

“…As LST data are required at a relatively finer resolution for many applications, such as urban heat island analysis, precise agriculture monitoring, etc. [5,6], considerable efforts have been devoted to sharpen the thermal imagery using VNIR bands [7,8]. Among them, the TsHARP method [9,10] is the most popular because of its operational simplicity and effectiveness [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Combination of TsHARP and Thin Plate Spline Interpolation for Spatial Sharpening of Thermal Imagery

et al. 2014

Remote Sensing

Self Cite

There have been many studies and much attention paid to spatial sharpening for thermal imagery. Among them, TsHARP, based on the good correlation between vegetation index and land surface temperature (LST), is regarded as a standard technique because of its operational simplicity and effectiveness. However, as LST is affected by other factors (e.g., soil moisture) in the areas with low vegetation cover, these areas cannot be well sharpened by TsHARP. Thin plate spline (TPS) is another popular downscaling technique for surface data. It has been shown to be accurate and robust for different datasets; however, it has not yet been attempted in thermal sharpening. This paper proposes to combine the TsHARP and TPS methods to enhance the advantages of each. The spatially explicit errors of these two methods were firstly estimated in theory, and then the results of TPS and TsHARP were combined with the estimation of their errors. The experiments performed across various landscapes and data showed that the proposed combined method performs more robustly and accurately than TsHARP.

“…Furthermore, when more residents populate an urban area, land prices inevitably rises, and the amount of space available for greenery shrinks [41]. In fact, having UGS nearby typically extends the living space and offers a connection with nature; it can also be strategically important because it provides a cooling effect and further maintains a high quality of life [11,17,19,37,42]. In addition, UGS not only has directly impacts on physical activity but also on raising the surrounding land value for the improvement of living environment [16,23].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decision Making on Allocating Urban Green Spaces Based upon Spatially-Varying Relationships between Urban Green Spaces and Urban Compaction Degree

Chang

2015

Sustainability

Abstract:The compact city is becoming a prevailing paradigm in the world to control urban sprawl and achieve a pattern of sustainable urban development. However, discussions of the area's overcrowded neighborhoods, its health problems, and the destruction of its green areas have inspired self-examination with respect to the compact city paradigm. High population density attracts even more residents and frequently renders the existing urban green space (UGS) insufficient for use as part of a living environment. Due to the unique benefits that these qualities confer, UGS allocation is now considered a significant contributing factor to urban livability. In addition, the UGS allocation may be different due to the presence of many spatial non-stationarity processes. Therefore, this study employs geographically-weighted regression (GWR) to explore the unique and spatially-explicit relationships between the degree of urban compaction and UGS within the Taipei metropolitan area. Maps summarizing the GWR results demonstrate that there is significantly insufficient UGS allocation in the central area, which consists mainly of Taipei City. Townships with higher parameters contain UGS levels that better meet the needs of their residents. Overall, the exploration of conceptualizing spatial heterogeneity of relationships between the degree of urban compaction and UGS can provide insightful analyses for decision-making on allocating UGS. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 13400