On the premise that urban heat islands are strongest in calm conditions but are largely absent in windy weather, daily minimum and maximum air temperatures for the period 1950–2000 at a worldwide selection of land stations are analyzed separately for windy and calm conditions, and the global and regional trends are compared. The trends in temperature are almost unaffected by this subsampling, i...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the DisTrad sharpening technique for deriving land surface temperatures over urban areas. While the original DisTrad technique is based on the correlation between land surface temperature and NDVI, this study evaluates the performance of DisTrad over different land covers by analysing the correlation between land surface temperature and 15 different indices...

Much research has gone into technologies to mitigate urban heat islands by making urban surfaces cooler by increasing their albedos. To be practical, the benefit of the technology must be greater than its cost. This report provides simple methods for quantifying the maxima of some benefits that albedo increases may provide. The method used is an extension of an earlier paper that estimated the ...

Lake Taihu is a shallow lake located in the Yangtze River delta region in eastern China. Lake breezes and their interactions with urban heat islands are of great importance to air quality andweather forecasting. In this study, surface observations at a dense network and Wind Profile Radar measurements were utilized to characterize the lake breezes at Lake Taihu and assess the impact of geophysi...

As the frequency and intensity of heatwaves are growing in Australia, strategies to combat heat are becoming more vital. Cities are exposed to urban heat islands (UHIs) due to excess urbanisation. In this study, a definition of urban heatwave (UHW) is conceptualised to investigate the combined impacts of heatwaves and UHIs. To quantify the negative impacts of UHW, indicators—such as excess morb...

Urbanization leads to distinct meteorological features of urban environments, and one the best-known is the urban heat island (UHI) effect. For megacities, these features become mesoscale phenomena (scale ≥ 10 km) that are amplified by the tropospheric feedbacks, and have substantial implications on human well-being. For the first time, a three-dimensional statistical description of the megacit...

Large tracts of abandoned urban land, resulting from the deindustrialization of metropolitan areas, are generating a renewed interest among city planners and community organizations envisioning the productive use of this land not only to produce fresh food but to effectively manage stormwater and mitigate the impact of urban heat islands. Healthy and productive soils are paramount to meet these...