Comparison of land surface and air temperatures for quantifying summer and winter urban heat island in a snow climate city

Chaobin Yang; Fengqin Yan; Shuwen Zhang

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110563

Comparison of land surface and air temperatures for quantifying summer and winter urban heat island in a snow climate city

J Environ Manage. 2020 Jul 1:265:110563. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110563. Epub 2020 Apr 9.

Authors

Chaobin Yang¹, Fengqin Yan², Shuwen Zhang³

Affiliations

¹ School of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, 255000, China. Electronic address: yangchaobin@sdut.edu.cn.
² State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China.
³ Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130102, China.

PMID: 32292176
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110563

Abstract

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is an increasingly consequential problem that confronts cities. The accurate characterization and quantification of UHI are crucial for sustainable urban development. Few UHI studies, however, compare data source, spatio-temporal variations, and indicators for the same city in parallel. This study uses Changchun, a snow climate city in China, as an example and compares five different indicators of the UHI based on land surface temperature (LST) derived from Landsat 8 TIRS and hourly air temperature (AT) collected from 41 meteorological weather stations to conduct a more comprehensive comparative study of the UHI. The results show the following. (1) The relationships between LST and AT are all statistically significant, and the surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity characterized by the LST is considerably stronger than that of AT both in summer and winter. (2) The SUHI intensity is significantly stronger in summer (6.83 °C) than in winter (1.55 °C) based on the morning LST, whereas the UHI intensity (0.27 °C in summer and 0.40 °C in winter) that is simultaneously quantified by the AT has an opposite result. The mean whole-day and daytime UHI intensity difference, which is quantified hourly by the AT between summer and winter, is not significant. The difference between nighttime and daytime UHI intensities is evident in both summer (1.26 °C) and winter (0.76 °C). Additionally, the high temperatures for both LST and AT have a more concentrated distribution in winter than in summer. (3) The values of UHI/SUHI intensity considerably vary based on different indicators. The different choices among land covers to represent "urban" and "rural" areas would significantly affect the values of UHI/SUHI intensity. The selection of appropriate indicators and data sources to quantify the UHI remains a problem that has to be resolved in future studies.

Keywords: Hourly air temperature; Indicator comparison; Land surface temperature; Spatio-temporal variations; Urban heat island.

MeSH terms

China
Cities
Environmental Monitoring
Hot Temperature*
Islands
Snow*
Temperature