The Impact of Central Heating on the Urban Thermal Environment Based on Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Research on the impact of anthropogenic heat discharge in a thermal environment is significant in climate change research. Central heating is more common in the winter in Northeast China as an anthropogenic heat. This study investigates the impact of central heating on the thermal environment in Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin based on multi-temporal land surface temperature retrieval from remote sensing. An equivalent heat island index method was proposed to overcome the problem of the method based on a single-phase image, which cannot evaluate all the central heating season changes. The method improves the comprehensiveness of a thermal environment evaluation by considering the long-term heat accumulation. The results indicated a significant increase in equivalent heat island areas at night with 22.1%, 17.3%, and 19.5% over Shenyang, Changchun, and Harbin. The increase was significantly positively correlated with the central heating supply (with an R-value of 0.89 for Shenyang, 0.93 for Changchun, and 0.86 for Harbin; p < 0.05). The impact of central heating has a more significant effect than the air temperature. The results provide a reference for future studies of urban thermal environment changes.

Satellite-Derived Land Surface Temperature Dynamics in the Context of Global Change—A Review

“…The only way to measure and quantify the UHI with remote sensing data is through the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) effect, which is the difference between the LST over urban areas relative to neighboring nonurban areas [2]. In most cases, this difference is positive, which was also reflected in our reviewed studies [64,66,67,[81][82][83]85,93,98,102,110,124,128,129,133,137]. However, in arid climates, where the non-urban environment is not covered by vegetation, it can also be negative [75,76,132,139], which is referred to as an urban heat sink.…”