On the statistics of urban heat island intensity

作者：Bin Zhou, Diego Rybski, Jürgen P. Kropp · 发表于：Geophysical Research Letters · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1002/2013gl057320 · 被引用次数：235 · 研究领域：Urban Heat Island Mitigation、Remote Sensing and Land Use、Urban Green Space and Health

We perform a systematic study of all cities in Europe to assess the Urban Heat Island (UHI) intensity by means of remotely sensed land surface temperature data. Defining cities as spatial clusters of urban land cover, we investigate the relationships of the UHI intensity, with the cluster size and the temperature of the surroundings. Our results show that in Europe, the UHI intensity in summer has a strong correlation with the cluster size, which can be well fitted by an empirical sigmoid model. Furthermore, we find a novel seasonality of the UHI intensity for individual clusters in the form of hysteresis‐like curves. We characterize the shape and identify apparent regional patterns.