The footprint of urban heat island effect in China

By Decheng Zhou, Shuqing Zhao, Liangxia Zhang, G. Sun, Yongqiang Liu. Scientific Reports, 2015

1,089 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Urban heat island (UHI) is one major anthropogenic modification to the Earth system that transcends its physical boundary. Using MODIS data from 2003 to 2012, we showed that the UHI effect decayed exponentially toward rural areas for majority of the 32 Chinese cities. We found an obvious urban/rural temperature “cliff” and estimated that the footprint of UHI effect (FP, including urban area) was 2.3 and 3.9 times of urban size for the day and night, respectively, with large spatiotemporal heterogeneities. We further revealed that ignoring the FP may underestimate the UHI intensity in most cases and even alter the direction of UHI estimates for few cities. Our results provide new insights to the characteristics of UHI effect and emphasize the necessity of considering city- and time-specific FP when assessing the urbanization effects on local climate.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ab5a3ac10819965d11be41ce837a3ea0f4d9708

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. Xuhui Lee
2. José A. Sobrino
3. Stefania Bonafoni
4. Dan Li
5. Kaveh Deilami

In Environmental Engineering

1. Tirthankar Chakraborty
2. Stefania Bonafoni
3. José A. Sobrino
4. J. Xiao
5. Dan Li
6. Kaveh Deilami

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Tirthankar Chakraborty
2. Xuhui Lee
3. J. Xiao
4. Dan Li
5. Kaveh Deilami

Citations in the corpus

• Satellite Remote Sensing of Surface Urban Heat Islands: Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives (2018, background): “As a result, most previous studies used outdated urban area maps [4,52,111] or a limited number of urban maps [6,53,109,234] to characterize the SUHI intensity over a long time period.”
• Climate–vegetation control on the diurnal and seasonal variations of surface urban heat islands in China (2016, methodology): “The rural areas were then defined as the buffer zone 40–45 km away from urban perimeter (Imhoff et al 2010) and outside the UHI footprint (Zhou et al 2015).”
• A simplified urban-extent algorithm to characterize surface urban heat islands on a global scale and examine vegetation control on their spatiotemporal variability (2019, background): “A recent study in China found that the footprint of the UHI can be twice or thrice the area of the city (Zhou et al., 2015).”