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

Abstract

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.