Spatiotemporal Land Use/Land Cover Changes and Impact on Urban Thermal Environments: Analyzing Cool Island Intensity Variations

Abstract

This study pioneers the comprehensive evaluation of the spatiotemporal evolution of land use/land cover (LULC) in Hangzhou city, introducing the novel water body shape index (WBSI) to analyze its seasonal impacts on the urban thermal environment and urban cool island (UCI) effects, uncovering distinct patterns of thermal regulation. It particularly investigates how distance gradients and the water body shape index (WBSI) influence land surface temperature (LST) in the urban core. The region’s climate, featuring hot summers and cold winters, highlights significant seasonal LST variations. Addressing a gap in existing UCI research, the analysis extends beyond the typical large-scale planning focus to include small-scale, high-resolution aspects. Employing remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) analysis techniques, this study analyzes the seasonal dynamics in Hangzhou’s central urban area. High-resolution LST data, obtained through single-channel inversion and resolution enhancement algorithms, are crucial to this analysis. This study employs the maximum likelihood classification method to analyze land use and land cover changes from 1990 to 2020. This analysis reveals potential drivers of urban thermal environment changes, such as the expansion of residential and commercial areas and the reduction in green spaces. Different regions in LST data are delineated to assess the cool island effect, and the complexity of water body boundaries is quantified using the water body shape index. Spatial and temporal patterns of LST changes are investigated using multivariate regression and time-series analysis models. We identified significant changes in LULC over the past 30 years in Hangzhou, closely correlating with a continuous rise in LST. This observation underscores a clear finding: the strategic importance of blue–green infrastructure in mitigating urban heat, a novel insight that extends the current understanding of urban thermal dynamics. A clear and novel finding of this study is that the intensity of the cool island effect from large water bodies not only diminishes with distance but is intricately influenced by the complexity of their shapes, as quantified by the WBSI, whereas the complexity of their boundaries enhances this effect. Additionally, the regulatory role of the cool island effect is observed to vary seasonally, being most pronounced in summer and less so in autumn and winter, thereby demonstrating a positive impact. In conclusion, our findings innovatively highlight how the specific shapes of water bodies, quantified through the water body shape index (WBSI), emerge as critical, yet previously underappreciated, drivers in modulating the urban thermal environment. This underscores a new avenue for urban planning, advocating for the strategic design of water bodies within urban landscapes. It also finds that spatial factors and seasonal variations significantly affect the intensity of the cool island effect. These findings offer valuable evidence for urban planning and climate change adaptation, emphasizing balancing natural elements with the built environment in urban design.