How Do Land–Climate Interactions Affect Urban Heat Islands?

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land–Climate Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 February 2024) | Viewed by 7334

Special Issue Editors

School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
Interests: urban heat island; land–atmosphere interactions; thermal environment; climate change; sustainability; urbanization
Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China
Interests: thermal comfort; sustainable development; green building; urban heat island
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Resources and Environment, Henan University of Economics and Law, Zhengzhou 450046, China
Interests: climate change; urban climate; climate change on energy consumption; ecological monitoring
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As indicated by the 2018 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion expected to reach 68% by 2050. Along with increasingly more urban inhabitants, natural ecosystems and agricultural lands are being replaced by impervious surfaces. Such conversions permanently change land surface properties in the exchange of energy and water fluxes between land surface and the atmosphere; then, the so-called urban heat island (UHI) is introduced, which refers to the phenomenon that urban areas tend to have higher air, land surface or belowground soil temperatures than their corresponding surrounding suburban and rural areas. The UHI has directly or indirectly impacted on the urban thermal environment, human temperature-related comfort, health and mortality, urban precipitation, energy use, air quality, etc., and severely threatens the urban sustainable development. Therefore, the long-term monitoring of the UHI is quite necessary, being essential to understanding UHI mechanisms from the perspective of land–climate interactions and finding mitigation and adaptation measures to alleviate the heat stress on human health.

For this Special Issue, we are interested in contributions regarding the monitoring of the UHI at multiple spatial-temporal scales and related land-climate interactions, especially comparative studies of surface and canopy UHIs based on land surface temperature and air temperature, UHI modelling, UHI attribution, and UHI mitigation. Several methods can be used separately or together, such as in situ observation, moving transect observation, remote sensing, numerical simulation, etc. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Interannual variation of UHI;
  • Diurnal and seasonal variation of UHI;
  • Comparison of surface and canopy UHI;
  • Land-climate interactions;
  • Energy budget;
  • UHI modelling;
  • UHI mitigation measures;
  • Urban sustainability.

Dr. Guosong Zhao
Dr. Zhifeng Wu
Dr. Yuanzheng Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • urban heat island
  • land–climate interaction
  • UHI modelling
  • energy balance
  • thermal comfort
  • urban sustainability
  • mitigation and adaptation
  • land surface temperature
  • surface air temperature

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 3182 KiB  
Article
Evaluating Differences between Ground-Based and Satellite-Derived Measurements of Urban Heat: The Role of Land Cover Classes in Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C.
by Vivek Shandas, Yasuyo Makido and Aakash Nath Upraity
Land 2023, 12(3), 562; https://doi.org/10.3390/land12030562 - 25 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1783
Abstract
The distinction between satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) and air temperature has become an increasingly important part of managing urban heat islands. While the preponderance of urban heat research relies on LST, the emergence of a growing infrastructure of publicly available consumer oriented, [...] Read more.
The distinction between satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) and air temperature has become an increasingly important part of managing urban heat islands. While the preponderance of urban heat research relies on LST, the emergence of a growing infrastructure of publicly available consumer oriented, ground-based sensor networks has offered an alternative for characterizing microscale differences in temperatures. Recent evidence suggests large differences between LST and air temperatures, yet discerning the reason for these differences between satellite-derived measurements of urban heat islands (UHI) and ground-based measurements of air temperature remains largely unresolved. In this study, we draw on an unusually robust and spatially exhaustive dataset of air temperature in two distinct bioclimates—Portland, Oregon, USA and Washington, D.C., USA—to evaluate the role of land cover on temperature. Our findings suggest that LST in highly built environments is consistently higher than recorded air temperatures, at times varying upwards of 15-degree Celsius, while forested areas contain between 2.5 and 3.5-degree Celsius lower temperatures than LST would otherwise indicate. Furthermore, our analyses points to the effects of land use and land cover features and other geophysical processes may have in determining differences in heat measurements across the two locations. The strength of the present analyses also highlights the importance of hyperlocal scales of data used in conjunction with coarser grain satellite derived data to inform urban heat assessments. Our results suggest a consistent pattern in both study areas, which can further our capacity to develop predictive models of air temperature using freely available descriptions of LST. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Do Land–Climate Interactions Affect Urban Heat Islands?)
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20 pages, 1616 KiB  
Article
Time Series Analyses and Forecasting of Surface Urban Heat Island Intensity Using ARIMA Model in Punjab, Pakistan
by Muhammad Sajid Mehmood, Zeeshan Zafar, Muhammad Sajjad, Sadam Hussain, Shiyan Zhai and Yaochen Qin
Land 2023, 12(1), 142; https://doi.org/10.3390/land12010142 - 31 Dec 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2332
Abstract
In the context of rapid urbanization, Urban Heat Island (UHI) is considered as a major anthropogenic alteration in Earth environments, and its temporal trends and future forecasts for large areas did not receive much attention. Using land surface temperature (LST) data from MODIS [...] Read more.
In the context of rapid urbanization, Urban Heat Island (UHI) is considered as a major anthropogenic alteration in Earth environments, and its temporal trends and future forecasts for large areas did not receive much attention. Using land surface temperature (LST) data from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer) for years 2006 to 2020, we quantified the temporal trends of daytime and nighttime surface UHI intensity (SUHII, difference of urban temperature to rural temperature) using the Mann-Kendall (MK) trend test in six major cities of the Punjab province of Pakistan and estimated the future SUHII for the year 2030 using the ARIMA model. Results from the study revealed that the average mean SUHII for daytime was noted as 2.221 °C and the average mean nighttime SUHII was noted as 2.82 °C for the years 2006 to 2020. The average mean SUHII for daytime and nighttime exhibited increasing trends for all seasons and annually, and for the daytime spring season it showed a maximum upward trend of 0.486 °C/year (p < 0.05) and for the nighttime annual SUHII with an increasing rate of 0.485 °C/year (p < 0.05) which exhibited a maximum upward trend. The ARIMA model forecast suggested an increase of 0.04 °C in the average daytime SUHII and an increase of 0.1 °C in the average nighttime SUHII until 2030. The results from this study highlight the increasing trends of daytime and nighttime SUHII, ARIMA also forecasted an increase in daytime and nighttime SUHII, suggesting various strategies are needed for an effective mitigation of the UHI effect. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Do Land–Climate Interactions Affect Urban Heat Islands?)
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18 pages, 21842 KiB  
Article
Characterizing Temporal Dynamics of Urban Heat Island in a Rapidly Expanding City: A 39 Years Study in Zhengzhou, China
by Huawei Li, Sandor Jombach, Guohang Tian, Yuanzheng Li and Handong Meng
Land 2022, 11(10), 1838; https://doi.org/10.3390/land11101838 - 19 Oct 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1940
Abstract
Extreme heat wave weather phenomena have erupted worldwide in recent years. The urban heat island (UHI) effect has exacerbated urban heat waves with serious consequences for urban energy and residents’ health. Therefore, a better understanding of the dynamics of the UHI effect and [...] Read more.
Extreme heat wave weather phenomena have erupted worldwide in recent years. The urban heat island (UHI) effect has exacerbated urban heat waves with serious consequences for urban energy and residents’ health. Therefore, a better understanding of the dynamics of the UHI effect and the influencing factors is needed in the context of carbon neutrality and global warming. This study used long-term observation and statistical data to investigate the urban heat island intensity (UHII) over the past 39 years (1981–2019) and to analyze the temporal changes of the UHI effect and the relationship between the UHI effect and indicators of rapid urbanization in Zhengzhou, China. The results showed that Zhengzhou is warming 2.2-times faster than the global land warming trend of about +0.9 °C from 1981 to 2019. There is a clear phase characteristic of the heat island effect in Zhengzhou, and it offers a rapid upward trend after 2000 and a positive correlation with the urbanization process; it was found that the social and economic conditions of urban expansion in Zhengzhou have a significant relationship with UHII. We also found that the denser the urban built-up area, the more obvious the heat island effect. Compared with other countries, the influence of national policies on urban development is an indirect factor influencing the change of UHI specifically for Chinese cities. This research could provide a reference for understanding the temporal dynamics of UHI in an expanding large city for sustainable urban planning and mitigating urban warming and environmental problems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue How Do Land–Climate Interactions Affect Urban Heat Islands?)
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