articleScientific ReportsJun 10, 2015GOLD OA

The footprint of urban heat island effect in China

Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology · Peking University · +1 more institution

PubMed
Indexed incrossrefdoajpubmed

Abstract

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…

Citation impact

1,619
total citations
FWCI
89.37
Percentile
100%
References
35
Citations per year

Authors

5

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Urban heat island
  • Urbanization
  • Footprint
  • Environmental science
  • China
  • Physical geography
  • Urban climate
  • Intensity (physics)
UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Sustainable cities and communities
No related works found for this paper.

Funding