A Twenty-Year Assessment of Spatiotemporal Variation of Surface Temperature in the Yangtze River Delta, China

Abstract

A good understanding of the processes of land surface temperature (LST) change is important for assessing regional climate change. In the present study, we obtained the MODIS MOD11A2 LST products over the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) from 2001 to 2020. In order to comprehensively assess the spatial and temporal variability of LST in the YRD region over the past two decades, the Theil–Sen Median trend analysis and Mann–Kendall test, BFAST01 trend decomposition, and landscape pattern analysis were used in this study. We show that the rate of linear change in LST in the YRD ranges from −0.019 °C/month to 0.046 °C/month. The BFAST01 trend decomposition identifies more details of LST change and monotonic increases, reversal increase, and interruption increase are the main warming trends. The distribution of the different trend types shows strong aggregation with high spatial heterogeneity. The LST breakpoints are mainly located in the northern and southern YRD, which frequently occurred during 2010–2013. Of the various land types, breakpoints occur most frequently in cropland and high NDVI (0.5–0.7) areas, and the intensity of most of them is within 2 °C. In addition, much stronger warming occurs in urban areas than in other land types. Our study provides a better understanding of the dynamics of LST in the YRD region over the past 20 years and highlights that breakpoints cannot be circumvented in regional temperature assessment.