Remote sensing of the urban heat island effect across biomes in the continental \{USA\}
Marc L. Imhoff and Ping Zhang and Robert E. Wolfe and Lahouari Bounoua

@article{Imhoff2010504,
title = "Remote sensing of the urban heat island effect across biomes in the continental \{USA\} ",
journal = "Remote Sensing of Environment ",
volume = "114",
number = "3",
pages = "504 - 513",
year = "2010",
note = "",
issn = "0034-4257",
doi = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2009.10.008",
url = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425709003174",
author = "Marc L. Imhoff and Ping Zhang and Robert E. Wolfe and Lahouari Bounoua",
keywords = "Urban heat island",
keywords = "Remote sensing",
keywords = "MODIS",
keywords = "Land surface temperature",
keywords = "Biomes",
keywords = "Landsat",
keywords = "Impervious surface area ",
abstract = "Impervious surface area (ISA) from the Landsat TM-based \{NLCD\} 2001 dataset and land surface temperature (LST) from \{MODIS\} averaged over three annual cycles (2003–2005) are used in a spatial analysis to assess the urban heat island (UHI) skin temperature amplitude and its relationship to development intensity, size, and ecological setting for 38 of the most populous cities in the continental United States. Development intensity zones based on %ISA are defined for each urban area emanating outward from the urban core to the non-urban rural areas nearby and used to stratify sampling for land surface temperatures and NDVI. Sampling is further constrained by biome and elevation to insure objective intercomparisons between zones and between cities in different biomes permitting the definition of hierarchically ordered zones that are consistent across urban areas in different ecological setting and across scales. We find that ecological context significantly influences the amplitude of summer daytime \{UHI\} (urban–rural temperature difference) the largest (8 °C average) observed for cities built in biomes dominated by temperate broadleaf and mixed forest. For all cities combined, \{ISA\} is the primary driver for increase in temperature explaining 70% of the total variance in LST. On a yearly average, urban areas are substantially warmer than the non-urban fringe by 2.9 °C, except for urban areas in biomes with arid and semiarid climates. The average amplitude of the \{UHI\} is remarkably asymmetric with a 4.3 °C temperature difference in summer and only 1.3 °C in winter. In desert environments, the LST's response to \{ISA\} presents an uncharacteristic “U-shaped” horizontal gradient decreasing from the urban core to the outskirts of the city and then increasing again in the suburban to the rural zones. UHI's calculated for these cities point to a possible heat sink effect. These observational results show that the urban heat island amplitude both increases with city size and is seasonally asymmetric for a large number of cities across most biomes. The implications are that for urban areas developed within forested ecosystems the summertime \{UHI\} can be quite high relative to the wintertime \{UHI\} suggesting that the residential energy consumption required for summer cooling is likely to increase with urban growth within those biomes. "
}