Land cover impacts towards thermal variation in the Kuala Lumpur City

Abstract

Physical geography and urban characteristics influence the urban climate conditions. Built-up areas, green urban parks, forest reserves, streets and terrain constitute the climatic interactions within urban areas. These have led to the variation of the urban climate condition throughout the world. Thus, in studying urban climate, the impacts of these factors are crucial to be examined. This study aims to examine the effects of six important factors, namely built-up areas, green covers, terrain elevation, building volume, surface roughness and land use type, which contribute to the variation of the urban climate condition within the Kuala Lumpur City. In this study, the effects of the six factors (urban parameters) towards the air surface temperature variation were statistically tested. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the remote sensing technique, the data needed for the analyses were extracted. The Geographical Information System (GIS) was employed as the analysis platform during the study. Based on the Spearman’s rho and Mann-Whitney U tests, it was identified that the six urban parameters and the air surface temperature variation are correlated. The further investigation conducted using the Kruskall-Wallis test has identified that only five of the urban parameters showed significant effects toward the air surface temperature variation, which are built-up areas, green covers, terrain elevation, building volume and surface roughness while the land use type was excluded. The findings of this study are very crucial as a pioneer research to integrate the urban climatic information in the urban planning decision making in tropical cities like Kuala Lumpur.