Diurnal and Seasonal Characteristics of Surface Urban Heat Island in Taiwan

EasyChair Preprint 7486

Abstract

Surface urban heat island (SUHI), a well-known consequence of urbanization, is one major anthropogenic modification on the Earth’s surface. In the recent decades, SUHIs have been greatly studied because of its significant impacts on the living environment of the humanity through easy access and continuous spatial coverage of satellite products. Some efforts were made to understand possible underlying mechanisms and factors of SUHI’s spatial variability over large regions. The purpose of this work is to analyze the diurnal and seasonal patterns of SUHI intensity (SUHII) over eleven major cities and counties (called cities for simplicity thereafter in the paper) in Taiwan using the latest version 6 Aqua/Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data acquired during the period 2003−2020. The results reveal that the SUHIIs are more intensive in the daytime than nighttime in all seasons and the northern cities exhibit higher SUHIIs than the southern cities (except in spring nighttime and winter nighttime). As for seasonal cycle, the SUHII considerably varies with season, with a higher seasonal variation in the daytime than nighttime for all cities. While the daytime SUHII's spatial pattern is strongly controlled by land-air latent heat exchange (as described by Normalized Difference Latent Heat Index; NDLI) in all seasons, the night SUHII is significantly correlated with NDLI in summer and autumn.

Keyphrases: Land Surface Temperature (LST), diurnal cycle, normalized difference latent heat index (NDLI), seasonal cycle, surface urban heat island intensity (SUHII)

@booklet{EasyChair:7486,
  author    = {Yuei-An Liou and Duy-Phien Tran and Kim-Anh Nguyen},
  title     = {Diurnal and Seasonal Characteristics of Surface Urban Heat Island in Taiwan},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 7486},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}