Abstract
Land surface temperature (LST) is a crucial parameter in surface urban heat island (SUHI) studies. A better understanding of the driving mechanisms, influencing variations in LST dynamics, is required for the sustainable development of a city. This study used Changchun, a city in northeast China, as an example, to investigate the seasonal effects of different dominant driving factors on the spatial patterns of LST. Twelve Landsat 8 images were used to retrieve monthly LST, to characterize the urban thermal environment, and spectral mixture analysis was employed to estimate the effect of the driving factors, and correlation and linear regression analyses were used to explore their relationships. Results indicate that, (1) the spatial pattern of LST has dramatic monthly and seasonal changes. August has the highest mean LST of 38.11 °C, whereas December has the lowest (−19.12 °C). The ranking of SUHI intensity is as follows: summer (4.89 °C) > winter with snow cover (1.94 °C) > spring (1.16 °C) > autumn (0.89 °C) > winter without snow cover (−1.24 °C). (2) The effects of driving factors also have seasonal variations. The proportion of impervious surface area (ISA) in summer (49.01%) is slightly lower than those in spring (56.64%) and autumn (50.85%). Almost half of the area is covered with snow (43.48%) in winter. (3) The dominant factors are quite different for different seasons. LST possesses a positive relationship with ISA for all seasons and has the highest Pearson coefficient for summer (r = 0.89). For winter, the effect of vegetation on LST is not obvious, and snow becomes the dominant driving factor. Despite its small area proportion, water has the strongest cooling effect from spring to autumn, and has a warming effect in winter. (4) Human activities, such as agricultural burning, harvest, and different choices of crop species, could also affect the spatial patterns of LST.
Highlights
Urbanization has occurred at an unprecedented rate and is considered as one of the most important drivers of dramatic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) [1,2]
Transformation from natural surfaces to various man-made impervious surfaces made of concrete, asphalt, and metal has resulted in the alteration of land surface characteristics, including land surface temperature (LST), hydrothermal condition, landscape composition, and albedo, which have led to the phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI), wherein urban areas tend to have warmer climates than their surrounding areas [3,4,5]
Previous studies have shown that the relationships between LST and air temperature are statistically significant, and UHI, quantified using retrieved LST from thermal remote sensing, has been defined as the surface UHI (SUHI) [15,16,17]
Summary
Urbanization has occurred at an unprecedented rate and is considered as one of the most important drivers of dramatic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) [1,2]. Previous studies have shown that the relationships between LST and air temperature are statistically significant, and UHI, quantified using retrieved LST from thermal remote sensing, has been defined as the surface UHI (SUHI) [15,16,17]. LST is one of the primary indicators for examining SUHI because it is related to surface radiation and energy exchange, and helps us to explicitly reveal sufficient spatial patterns of the urban thermal environment, despite being subject to the time of satellite overpass [18,19]. The spatiotemporal variations (from global to city level, and from interannual, seasonal, and monthly, to diurnal, nocturnal, and even hourly level) of the urban thermal environment spatial pattern has been explored by many studies [19,20,21,22,23,24]
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