The influence of urban land cover and land use on local climate in Taiwan

Abstract

The global warming has become worse with the industry developing and environment destroyed. Because of problems on highly land developed, natural environment changed, and other artificial heat influences, it causes that urban heat island effect in the urban region with highly intensive population and makes the living environment worse at the same time. Finally, we mainly investigate the influence of land use on urban microclimate and provide some strategies of mitigating the urban temperature increasing. In the study, we divided the land use patterns around each measured location into five categories: the building area, the paved area, the free area, the green area, the waters area, and we established 24 different measuring points in Taichung, Taiwan (120°40’E, 24°08’N) in the summer of 2008 and 2009 with the long-term air temperature and the humidity fixed-point monitoring. After the land use pattern factors was quantified with buffering analysis, the association analysis were made by ANOVA and multiple regression analysis, regarding the minimum, average and maximum temperature data obtained climatic monitoring for each location. Finally, we established five divinable air temperature equations and the results shows that it will create 0.6~3.8? daily temperature differences around the different proportion of urban land use patterns in the same instrument mounted situation. Besides, the temperature will decrease 0.6~2.6? with the factor in green area and increase 1.8~3.8? with the factor in pavement area. In conclusion, we forecast microclimate variation by the urban land-use plan, and propose four aspects of strategies: urban development strength controlling, trees planting increasingly, permeable pavement building, and urban water landscape creating, in order to be the reference of improving the urban micro-climate and building a suitable outdoor thermal environment for health.