Understanding the Role of Optimized Land Use/Land Cover Components in Mitigating Summertime Intra-Surface Urban Heat Island Effect: A Study on Downtown Shanghai, China

• Published in: Energies (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 7; p. 1678
• Main Authors: Guo, Yan-jun, Han, Jie-jie, Zhao, Xi, Dai, Xiao-yan, Zhang, Hao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 03.04.2020
• Subjects: Accuracy; Blackbody; China; Cities; Classification; Climate change; Datasets; Heat; Heat flux; Image processing; Land cover; Land development; Land use; land use/land cover; Landsat; Methods; Nonlinear analysis; Nonlinear programming; partial least square regression; Remote sensing; Sensible heat; Sensors; Shanghai; Sharpening; Statistical analysis; Studies; surface urban heat island effect; Sustainable development; Temperature; Urban areas; Urban heat islands; China
• ISSN: 1996-1073; 1996-1073
• DOI: 10.3390/en13071678

In this study, 167 land parcels of downtown Shanghai, China, were used to investigate the relationship between parcel-level land use/land cover (LULC) components and associated summertime intra-surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect, and further analyze the potential of mitigating summertime intra-SUHI effect through the optimized LULC components, by integrating a thermal sharpening method combining the Landsat-8 thermal band 10 data and high-resolution Quickbird image, statistical analysis, and nonlinear programming with constraints. The results show the remarkable variations in intra-surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect, which was measured with the mean parcel-level blackbody sensible heat flux in kW per ha (Mean_pc_BBF). Through measuring the relative importance of each specific predictor in terms of their contributions to changing Mean_pc_BBF, the influence of parcel-level LULC components on excess surface flux of heat energy to the atmosphere was estimated using the partial least square regression (PLSR) model. Analysis of the present and optimized parcel-level LULC components and their contribution to the associated Mean_pc_BBF were comparable between land parcels with varying sizes. Furthermore, focusing on the gap between the present and ideally optimized area proportions of parcel-level LULC components towards minimizing the Mean_pc_BBF, the uncertainties arising from the datasets and methods, as well as the implications for sustainable land development and mitigating the UHI effect were discussed.