The effects of urban growth-driven land cover change on urban heat island

Abstract:

Previous assessments of surface urban heat island (UHI) have primarily focused on using limited remote sensing and land cover data to quantify UHI intensity and spatial distribution within discrete timeframes without information on land change dynamics. Defining the non-urban area extent in UHI estimation also varies from study to study. In this study, we quantitatively characterized the spatiotemporal variations of UHI using time series of Landsat land surface temperature products and annual land change information. We evaluated the impact of variable non-urban reference extents on UHI using different non-urban buffers. We analyzed UHI change in Sioux Falls, SD, located in the north-central United States and found that the intensity of the UHI effect increased between 1986 and 2017. The mean UHI intensity in the region was found to be as large as 2.2 °C during the period 1986-2017 with an increasing trend of 0.02 °C per year. The UHI intensity associated with high density urban land usually is stronger than with the low-density urban land. The result also suggests when using a 5-km non-urban buffer (compared to with 1-km and 10-km) surrounding the urban core in the study area, the spatiotemporal change of UHI effects is quantified with less bias potentially induced by data quality.