Quantifying urban heat island effect often requires the observation of air temperature distribution over the whole city. Satellite or aircraft mounted radiometers, car mounted temperature sensors and GPS loggers or fixed point monitoring have been employed in previous studies for urban heat island effect analysis. Above methods often are very expensive, labour intensive and have its own limitat...

Extreme heat is a leading cause of weather-related human mortality. The urban heat island (UHI) can magnify heat exposure in metropolitan areas. This study investigates the ability of a new MODIS-retrieved near-surface air temperature and humidity dataset to depict urban heat patterns over metropolitan Chicago, Illinois, during June–August 2003–13 under clear-sky conditions. A self-organizing m...

Exposures to dangerously high temperatures are a public health threat expected to increase with global climate change. Heat waves exacerbate the risks associated with heat exposure, and urban residents are particularly vulnerable to threats of heat waves due to the urban heat island effect. To understand how heat waves are changing over time, we examine changes in four heat wave characteristics...

Urban heat island is among the most evident aspects of human impacts on the earth system. Here we assess the diurnal and seasonal variation of surface urban heat island intensity (SUHII) defined as the surface temperature difference between urban area and suburban area measured from the MODIS. Differences in SUHII are analyzed across 419 global big cities, and we assess several potential biophy...

In this letter, the urban heat island effects on the temperature time series of Uccle (Brussels, Belgium) during the summers months 1960–1999 was estimated using both ground-based weather stations and remote sensing imagery, combined with a numerical land surface scheme including state-of-the-art urban parameterization, the Town Energy Balance Scheme. Analysis of urban warming based on remote s...

Rapidly expanding desert populations have significantly altered surface microclimatic conditions. These modifications are evident for much of the year, since desert areas are frequently affected by stable, clear, calm weather. Past empirical analyses of urban effects for Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, have highlighted the large magnitude of the “urban heat island effect” with minimum temperatures...

Cities are well known to be hotter than the rural areas that surround them; this phenomenon is called the urban heat island.Heat waves are excessively hot periods duringwhich the air temperatures of both urban and rural areas increase significantly. However, whether urban and rural temperatures respond in the sameway to heat waves remains a critical unanswered question. In this study, a combina...

The purpose of this study is to investigate Alahsa Governorate status and its vulnerability to generate urban heat islands. Alahsa Governorate is a famous oasis in the Arabic Peninsula including several oil centers. Extensive literature review was done to collect previous relative data on the urban heat island of Alahsa Governorate. Data used for the purpose of this research were collected from...