Abstract
Urban parks have been proven to cool the surrounding environment, and can thus mitigate the urban heat island to an extent by forming a park cooling island. However, a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of park cooling islands is still required. Therefore, we studied 32 urban parks in Jinan, China and proposed absolute and relative indicators to depict the detailed features of the park cooling island. High-spatial-resolution GF-2 images were used to obtain the land cover of parks, and Landsat 8 TIR images were used to examine the thermal environment by applying buffer analysis. Linear statistical models were developed to explore the relationships between park characteristics and the park cooling island. The results showed that the average land surface temperature (LST) of urban parks was approximately 3.6 °C lower than that of the study area, with the largest temperature difference of 7.84 °C occurring during summer daytime, while the average park cooling area was approximately 120.68 ha. The park cooling island could be classified into four categories—regular, declined, increased, and others—based on the changing features of the surrounding LSTs. Park area (PA), park perimeter (PP), water area proportion (WAP), and park shape index (PSI) were significantly negatively correlated with the park LST. We also found that WAP, PP, and greenness (characterized by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)) were three important factors that determined the park cooling island. However, the relationship between PA and the park cooling island was complex, as the results indicated that only parks larger than a threshold size (20 ha in our study) would provide a larger cooling effect with the increase in park size. In this case, increasing the NDVI of the parks by planting more vegetation would be a more sustainable and effective solution to form a stronger park cooling island.
Highlights
Numerous studies have explored the relationship between urban characteristics and urban park cooling islands, and the results showed that the park cooling effect could be affected by the park’s size, shape, type, greenness, and other factors [25,26,27]
Statistical models were constructed to explore the effects of driving factors on the park cooling island
We found that the average land surface temperature (LST) of urban parks was approximately
Summary
The world is currently experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization, which has led to dramatic changes in the land use, land cover, and local climatic conditions, thereby exacerbating urban heat island (UHI) effects [1,2,3,4]. The negative effects from UHIs have significantly increased the energy consumption for cooling, physical discomfort, and even death [5,6,7]. It is projected that 60% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2030, and making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable is one of the 17 goals proposed by the United Nations to transform our world [8]. Studies on alleviating the UHI effect have become more popular than its spatial–temporal monitoring [9,10,11,12]
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