Urban heat island effects derived from dense Landsat thermal observations in Nanjing, China

An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area where temperatures are higher than they are in the surrounding suburban areas. UHIs are of great scientific concern in the context of global environmental change. As a result of rapid economic development over the past three decades, the urban area in China has increased significantly. In the present study, to objectively determine the spatiotemporal patterns of UHI effects in Nanjing, surface brightness temperatures of the urban areas of Nanjing, which originated from remote sensing imagery of Landsat TM/ETM+ from 1988 to 2011, were inversed, and then the UHIs were extracted and graded by choosing a stable forest area as the suburban reference. When the results were combined with the surface meteorological data, a good relationship was found between the brightness temperatures and the ground-truth temperatures. The results of contrast analysis indicated that, over time, most of the heat islands of Nanjing remained over the central portions. The area and the intensity of the heat islands have both increased remarkably over the past 20