Abstract
The urban environment is a complex system featuring interactions between nature and humans. Scant research on urban areas has analyzed and assessed urban heat islands (UHIs) from the perspectives of nature and humans. This study analyzes the spatio-temporal characteristics of UHIs in Hangzhou in China in the context of the relationship between nature and humans based on the standard deviational ellipse, Pearson correlation analysis, and principal component analysis. The results show the following: (1) From 2000 to 2020, the coverage of UHIs in the main urban area of Hangzhou decreased, but areas with sub-high temperatures and high temperatures increased. (2) From 2000 to 2020, the main axis of the spatial development of UHIs persisted along the northwestsoutheast direction. The spatial pattern of UHIs in Hangzhou was closely related to the direction of urban development. (3) The results of principal component analysis show that socio-economic activities, surface coverage and topography were the major factors influencing UHIs in Hangzhou. (4) Natural factors have slowed the development of UHIs while human factors have aggravated their formation, where the former contributed more significantly to them than the latter. For each unit of change in nine factors that were considered, the surface temperature in the study area decreased by 0.166 units.
Highlights
Urbanized land accounts for only 2% of the Earth’s surface, it is home to more than half the world’s population and consumes more than 75% of its energy [1],[2], where its share of the latter will continue to grow [3]
We used principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the impact factor and used regression analysis to study how changes in the potential influential factors affected the evolution of urban heat islands (UHIs) in the central urban area of Hangzhou
The results show that the land surface temperature (LST) of Hangzhou changed to -0.243 (NDVI), -0.178 (MNDWI), -0.126 (DEM)
Summary
Urbanized land accounts for only 2% of the Earth’s surface, it is home to more than half the world’s population and consumes more than 75% of its energy [1],[2], where its share of the latter will continue to grow [3]. Urbanization promotes the transformation from the natural landscape to an impermeable human-made surface, and leads to drastic changes in the ground radiation, heat conductivity, and atmospheric humidity in urban areas [4]. These changes create conditions for the accumulation of heat, resulting in higher atmospheric or surface temperatures in urban areas than in surrounding areas. UHIs have been identified in most countries of the world [8] They affect the environmental quality, local climate, and energy supply [9]-[11], and have negative impacts on the health of humans, especially the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and the homeless [12]-[14]. Research on the mechanism driving the formation of UHIs can help understand the impact of human activities on the urban environment, which can in turn help devise the means to eliminate the negative effects of the rise in urban temperature and promote the sustainable development of cities
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