A Satellite View of Urban Heat Island: Causative Factors and Scenario Analysis

Although many researches for heat island study have been developed, there is little attempt to link the findings to actual and hypothetical scenarios of urban developments which would help to mitigate the Urban Heat Island (UHI) in cities. The aim of this paper is to analyze the UHI at urban area with different geometries, land use, and environmental factors, and emphasis on the influence of different geometric and environmental parameters on ambient air temperature. In order to evaluate these effects, the parameters of (i) Air pollution (i.e. Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT)), (ii) Green space Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), (iii) Anthropogenic heat (AH) (iv) Building density (BD), (v) Building height (BH), and (vi) Air temperature (Ta) were mapped. The optimum operational scales between Heat Island Intensity (HII) and above parameters were evaluated by testing the strength of the correlations for every resolution. The best compromised scale for all parameters is 275m resolution. Thus, the measurements of these parameters contributing to heat island formation over the study areas of Hong Kong were established from mathematical relationships between them and in combination at 275m resolution. The mathematical models were then tabulated to show the impact of different percentages of parameters on HII. These tables are useful to predict the probable climatic implications of future planning decisions.