Abstract
Temporal variation of urban heat island (UHI) intensity is one of the most important themes in UHI studies. However, fine-scale temporal variability of UHI with explicit spatial information is sparse in the literature. Based on the hourly air temperature from 195 meteorological stations during August 2015 in Changchun, China, hourly spatiotemporal patterns of UHI were mapped to explore the temporal variability and the effects of land use on the thermal environment using time series analysis, air temperature profiling, and spatial analysis. The results showed that: (1) high air temperature does not indicate strong UHI intensity. The nighttime UHI intensity (1.51 °C) was much stronger than that in the daytime (0.49 °C). (2) The urban area was the hottest during most of the day except the period from late morning to around 13:00 when there was about a 40% possibility for an “inverse UHI intensity” to appear. Paddy land was the coolest in the daytime, while woodland had the lowest temperature during the nighttime. (3) The rural area had higher warming and cooling rates than the urban area after sunrise and sunset. It appeared that 23 °C was the threshold at which the thermal characteristics of different land use types changed significantly.
Highlights
The urban heat island (UHI), which is the phenomenon where cities are typically warmer than surrounding rural areas is a result of the process that natural landscapes with vegetation and permeable surfaces are gradually replaced by dense buildings with large heat capacity [1,2,3]
It was found in this study that the hourly variation of urban air temperature was very different from that of UHI intensity
Air temperature data collected from 195 meteorological stations during August 1–31, 2015 in Changchun, which is a city located in a cold zone, were used to characterize UHI intensity and the thermal environment
Summary
The urban heat island (UHI), which is the phenomenon where cities are typically warmer than surrounding rural areas is a result of the process that natural landscapes with vegetation and permeable surfaces are gradually replaced by dense buildings with large heat capacity [1,2,3]. Along with anthropogenic heat sources, the transformation alters the natural solar and hydrological balances of cities, thereby making UHI a common phenomenon worldwide [4,5,6,7,8]. The UHI and heat waves are thought to have a large impact on energy consumption [9], human health [10], air pollution [11], and ecological balances [12]. Public Health 2019, 16, 2467; doi:10.3390/ijerph16142467 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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