Coupling urbanization analyses for studying urban thermal environment and its interplay with biophysical parameters based on TM/ETM+ imagery

Abstract

Studies of urbanization and urban thermal environment are now attracting wide interests among scientists all over the world. This study investigated the influences of urbanization on urban thermal environment as well as the relationships of thermal characteristics to other biophysical variables in Guangzhou, China utilizing three dates of Landsat TM/ETM+ images acquired in 1990, 2000, and 2005, respectively. Vegetation abundances and percent impervious surfaces were derived by means of linear spectral mixture model, and a method for effectively enhancing impervious surface has been developed to accurately examine the urban enlargement. As a key parameter for studying urban thermal characteristics, the land surface temperature (LST) was also retrieved from thermal infrared band of each TM/ETM+ dataset. Based on these parameters, the urban expansion, urban heat island effect and the relationships of LSTs to other biophysical parameters were then analyzed. Results indicated that the area ratio of impervious surface in Guangzhou increased significantly, which grew from 20.56% in 1990, to 34.72% in 2000, and further to 41.12% in 2005, however, the intensity of urban heat island was not always enlarged in observed years. In addition, Geostatistical analyses showed that the mean-centre of the impervious surface was moving towards the northwest during 1990–2005. And correlation analyses revealed that, at the pixel-scale, the association of LSTs to other two variables (vegetation abundance and percent impervious surface) was not straightforward, while LSTs possessed a strong positive correlation with percent impervious surfaces and negative correlation with vegetation abundances at the regional-scale, respectively. This study provided an integrated research scheme and the findings can be very useful for urban ecosystem modeling.