Abstract
As urban thermal environments are being caused by global climatic changes and urbanization is not uniform on diurnal, seasonal, or annual scales, the spatiotemporal patterns of surface urban heat islands (SUHI) similarly vary between cities across regions. This research assessed the spatiotemporal variations in SUHI intensities (SUHII), and then revealed their spatiotemporal patterns and relationships that existed within 32 major cities in China using spatialization technologies, such as the self-organizing map (SOM) method and statistical methods. Results showed that the spatial patterns of the SUHII patterns in China were significantly affected by the climatic types, whereas human heat discharge also disturbed the patterns to a certain extent. Specifically, the daytime SUHIIs in China had much higher seasonal variations in North China than in South China. The nighttime SUHIIs were much weaker and more stable than the daytime SUHIIs, and had far more obvious spatial patterns with much higher values in North China than in South China. As for the temporal regimes, the temporal variation in the SUHIIs in one city was more related to the development of the urbanization. To be specific, not all cities were experiencing increasingly worse urban thermal environments with urbanization as reported by previous studies. This research not only proposes a spatiotemporal framework to study the SUHIIs patterns and their relationships, but also provides an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of SUHIIs in China.
Highlights
Rapid urbanization has resulted in faster urban climate change compared with global changes, especially in developing countries such as China [1]
At the micro-scale, considerable progress in the intra-city surface urban heat island (SUHI) studies has occurred based on medium high spatial resolution (e.g., Landsat TM/ETM+), which usually focuses on the spatial patterns of land surface temperature (LST) and its relationship with the urban surface characteristics as indicated by land use and land cover types, vegetation indexes, and urban landscapes or structures [3,7,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
The results provided a regional understanding of the SUHI intensity (SUHII) in China
Summary
Rapid urbanization has resulted in faster urban climate change compared with global changes, especially in developing countries such as China [1]. At the micro-scale, considerable progress in the intra-city SUHI studies has occurred based on medium high spatial resolution (e.g., Landsat TM/ETM+), which usually focuses on the spatial patterns of land surface temperature (LST) and its relationship with the urban surface characteristics as indicated by land use and land cover types, vegetation indexes, and urban landscapes or structures [3,7,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] These categories of research demonstrated the detailed spatial heterogeneity of the SUHII, the trade-off between the spatial and temporal resolution complicated the conducting of continuous long-term series monitoring and the comparative understanding of SUHII between cities in the regions. Further studies are needed to present the regional regularity to fill this research gap
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