Impacts of Urban land surface temperature on tract landscape pattern, physical and social variables

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper first focuses on the study of the relationship between the urban heat island (UHI) and the selected physical variables (percentage of urban surface covers, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)) and social variables (population density (PDEN)), and then concentrates on the study of the relationship between UHI and the landscape spatial geometric patterns. The researched results discover that urban Land Surface Temperature (LST) is not only impacted by land cover composition, i.e. land use/cover, which is expressed in this paper as the PURB (commerce/industry/transportation), but also its spatial geometric configuration, i.e. various landscape geometric pattern metrics, which in this paper are expressed by compositional percentage of landscape area (PLAND), configurational edge density (ED), patch density (PD), landscape shape index (LSI), clumpiness index (CI), and Shannon’s diversity index (SHDI). The results show that the proportion of vegetation coverage out of a tract impacts its contribution to an entire UHI in Washington District of Columbia (DC), in particular, interspersing vegetation within a tract is capable of making a stronger mitigation effect to UHI than its concentrated form. Thus, a scatter spatial arrangement and distribution of vegetation is proposed to mitigate UHI effect.