Study on urban heat island of Shanghai by using multi-temporal remote sensing data and air temperature data

Urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon is one of the most serious environmental problems accompanied with the urban developments. The spatial distribution of UHI changed in different time such as season, month, day or hour. In roder to analyze the UHI phenomenon accurately, we should detemine the optimum time when the clearest and the biggest UHI intensity might occur. By selecting Shanghai city of China as the study area, the paper used the air temperature data measured by the automatic meteorological stations with the interval an hour in year 2005 to analyze daily variation of the UHI intensity at different seasons and months. The results revealed the optimum time to study UHI phenomenon and its distribution variation was night in Oct. On the basis of the following conclusion, multi-temporal polar meteorological satellite data were adopted to discuss the UHI spatial distribution in Shanghai and the influence of the underlying land surface types. According to the research results, it is feasible to study the distribution of the UHI intensity changed with time and space by combining the conventional meteorological station data with a higher temporal resolution and remote sensing data with a better spatial continuity.