Evaluating Urban Heat Island Effects in Rapidly Developing Coastal Cities

Abstract

In this chapter, we present the analysis of urban heat island (UHI) effects on coastal urban areas using satellite images as a case study in Hangzhou, China. With the sustainable development of coastal areas, land use and land cover have been dramatically changed. Such changes make the phenomenon of urban heat island (UHI) becoming serious, which has brought some negative influences on human activities or public health issues in coastal regions. This study takes Hangzhou as an example of coastal cities and uses the Landsat TM, ETM+ and OLI images to retrieve the urban land surface temperature (LST). We also mapped and compared the intensity of UHI effects in different years of 2003, 2008 and 2013. The result shows that the intensity of UHI effect in 2013 was more serious than previous years, which is increasing year by year. The study also analyzed the relationship between UHI, NDVI, and NDBI and provided some useful suggestions to mitigate the UHI effects on coastal cities such as Hangzhou in China. Keywords: urban heat island, land surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index, normalized difference build-up index