Enhancing SUHI monitoring in mountainous cities: A comparative study of Chongqing and Chengdu, China

作者：Dejun Zhang, Shiqi Yang, Hao Zhu, Qinyu Ye, Zeneng He, Wan‐Huan Zhou, Yuyu Zhou · 发表于：Urban Climate · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.uclim.2025.102656 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Urban Heat Island Mitigation、Impact of Light on Environment and Health、Urban Green Space and Health

Accurately defining rural reference areas is a key challenge in monitoring the surface urban heat island (SUHI). This challenge is especially pronounced in mountainous cities with complex terrains, where factors such as urban-rural elevation differences, scattered rural settlements, and pixel scale significantly affect SUHI evaluation. Based on the traditional buffer method (TBM), this study proposes a multi-factor decision method (MFD) for defining rural reference areas in SUHI monitoring for mountainous cities. The MFD integrates digital elevation model (DEM), nighttime light (NTL), land use and land cover change (LUCC), and Landsat normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data. The applicability of the MFD algorithm was evaluated by comparing its performance with that of the TBM in a mountainous city (Chongqing metropolitan circle) and a plain city (Chengdu). The results show that, as the buffer scale increases from 5 km to 25 km, the mean land surface temperature (LST) of rural reference pixels extracted using the TBM algorithm ( LST t ) decreases by 1.6 K in Chengdu and by 1.9 K in Chongqing metropolitan circle, whereas the LST extracted using the MFD algorithm ( LST m ) decreases by only 0.4 K in Chengdu and 0.6 K in Chongqing metropolitan circle. The changes in LST m are consistently smaller than those of LST t in both study area. These findings indicate that the MFD algorithm provides more stable rural reference areas for SUHI estimation than the TBM algorithm an...