An urban heat island (UHI) is a phenomenon whereby urban areas experience elevated temperatures relative to the surrounding rural hinterland. This thermal contrast is brought about by anthropogenic modification of the environment. For example, there is little bare earth and vegetation in urban areas. This means that less energy is used in evaporating water, less of the Sun’s energy is reflected...

As a promising application, quantitative remote sensing of urban heat island (UHI) could facilitate our understanding of urban/suburban environment and its relationship with urbanization. This paper investigates the urban heat island effect of Lanzhou, China, a densely built up city in a valley, based on Landsat ETM+ image acquired on April 22, 2000, whose spatial resolution is sufficient for m...

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Urbanization is developing unprecedentedly on a global scale. One of the chief repercussions of urbanization, caused by man-made alterations in land-use/land-cover (LULC), is the formation of urban heat islands. Albeit, differences among landscape structures and its accompanied effects on the environment are mostly neglected. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to survey the variou...

In a companion paper, the authors presented a formulation and evaluation of an urban parameterization designed to represent the urban energy balance in the Community Land Model. Here the robustness of the model is tested through sensitivity studies and the model’s ability to simulate urban heat islands in different environments is evaluated. Findings show that heat storage and sensible heat flu...

[1] Increasing the albedo of urban surfaces has received attention as a strategy to mitigate urban heat islands. Here, the effects of globally installing white roofs are assessed using an urban canyon model coupled to a global climate model. Averaged over all urban areas, the annual mean heat island decreased by 33%. Urban daily maximum temperature decreased by 0.6 C and daily minimum temperatu...

BACKGROUND Heatwaves present a significant health risk and the hazard is likely to escalate with the increased future temperatures presently predicted by climate change models. The impact of heatwaves is often felt strongest in towns and cities where populations are concentrated and where the climate is often unintentionally modified to produce an urban heat island effect; where urban areas can...

Urban land cover is one of the fastest global growing land cover types which permanently alters land surface properties and atmospheric interactions, often initiating an urban heat island effect. Urbanisation comprises a number of land cover changes within metropolitan regions. However, these complexities have been somewhat neglected in temperature analysis studies of the urban heat island effe...