The impacts of urban landscape pattern on urban land surface temperature: —Taking Urumqi as an Example

Abstract

Urbanization has become an important contributor for global warming and urban air temperature is rising gradually in all the cities. It means that urban land use and land cover (LULC) changed became critical in determining the urban environment quality. This paper presents an integrated study to investigate and identify landscape pattern which have the influence to increase of land surface temperature, using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing. In this paper, an oasis city-Urumqi as an example, which explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of land use and land cover change from 1990 to 2004, and the land surface temperature variation from 1990 to 2004. Results shows that land use of Urumqi appeared a dramatic variation during the last 15 years. The mean annul temperatures of the land surface in Urumqi were 21.41 °C in 1990 and 31.12 °C in 2004, respectively. In particular, the land surface temperature and landscape pattern index had shown the close relationship. To sum up, integration of remote sensing and GIS was an effective way to monitor and analyze urban LULC, and evaluate the landscape pattern impact on land surface temperature.