Abstract
Abstract Cities experience the extensive urban heat island effect (UHI), which continue to pose challenges for humanity's increasingly urban population, where tropical cities have experienced a continued and rapid urbanization process in the past few decades. We present the evolution of surface UHI and its controlling factors in the Metropolitan Region of Belém, over the last 16 years (2003-2018), which has experienced unique consolidated economic growth and urban transformation under wet equatorial climate. We incorporate MODIS and Landsat satellite data and evaluate statistical techniques for estimates the variation in the land surface temperature (LST) during two seasons: wet season and dry season. Our result revealed that the regions of fast urbanization resulted in a decrease of normalized difference vegetation index and increase of LST. In addition, annual maps showed the spatial pattern of surface UHI intensities were produced based on daytime and nighttime temperature, and the analysis result indicated that the spatial distribution of high heat capacity was closely related with the densely built-up areas. These findings are helpful for understanding the urbanization process as well as urban ecology, which both have significant implications for urban planning and minimize the potential environmental impacts of urbanization in Metropolitan Region of Belém.
Highlights
Urbanization leads to a dramatic change in the underlying surface structure, properties, and spatial distribution of a city, such as a reduction in green areas and a corresponding increase in impervious areas (Cui et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2019)
These changes increase the temperature difference between urban and surrounding non-urbanized areas, or indicates that an urban area is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to artificial land cover and anthropogenic heat (Chakraborty and Lee, 2019), which is known as the Urban Heat Island (UHI)
From the spatial distribution in both years, we concluded that the inner-southside area had a smaller normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) value and a larger value of Land Surface Temperature (LST) wide-ranging from 28.5 °C – 32.7 °C, and that through a visual inspection, a surface urban heat island existed within the city
Summary
Urbanization leads to a dramatic change in the underlying surface structure, properties, and spatial distribution of a city, such as a reduction in green areas and a corresponding increase in impervious areas (Cui et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2019). The complex spatial arrangement of surfaces in urban areas, makes it difficult, or even impossible, to estimate the local variations in surface temperature based on these data alone (Hu et al, 2019) In this way, with the development of remote sensing technology, satellite imagery have been used to estimate Land Surface Temperature (LST), the main driver of air temperature, and to map the spatial distribution of LST, many studies have been showed the air temperature can be higher or lower than surface temperature depending on various factors such as the presence and direction of wind, insolation and surface characteristics (Lehoczky et al, 2017; Zhou et al, 2018). LST can provide an estimate of the spatial pattern of temperature over large areas (Mathew et al, 2016)
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