Impact of land transformation processes in Eastern China on the long-term development of land surface temperatures

Abstract

The purpose of the presented study is to evaluate the comprehensive impact of different land cover types on the temperature development in the entire Shandong Province by a 20-year-long (MODIS) LST time series from 2003 to 2022. To find out the primary influencing factors, methods such as the Pearson correlation, stepwise analysis, and best-subset selection were applied. The results revealed that the average temperatures had been rising in summer during day- and night-time by 2.32 °C and 1.22 °C, respectively and in winter during day- and night-time by 3.25 °C and 1.33 °C, whereby a significant contribution can be attributed to the period 2014-2022. Substantial variations in LSTs emerge between built-up and vegetated areas and landlocked and coastal regions. Moreover, we could identify a contribution of 0.089 °C, caused merely by the extension of built-up areas of 1.65% in the entire Shandong Province. Modeling the combined effects of further relevant variables/factors, the percentage of cropland area (crop-per) and the number of landscape patches (NPl) indicate considerable influence on the daytime temperature in the temporal domain.