Quantifying the contribution of land use change to the surface urban heat island in China

Urban Heat Island (UHI), a phenomenon characterized by significantly higher air and land surface temperatures (LSTs) in urban areas than in suburban areas, results in land use change from non-urban to urban land and is accompanied by increases in anthropogenic heat release. A variety of land use contribution indexes have been proposed to quantitatively calculate the impact of land use types on UHI. However, these indexes can only show the impact of specific land use types on UHI. In fact, the area and the intensity (which also can be considered as the average temperature) of land use change jointly determine the regional UHI. The purpose of this paper is to develop an algorithm to quantitatively reveal the influence of the area and the intensity of land use change on regional UHI. MODIS LST products and 1:1,000,000 land use data sets were used to quantitatively calculate the seasonal and interannual contributions of land use change on regional UHI between 2005 and 2018 in China. These results have theoretical and practical significance for further understanding the formation mechanism of urban thermal environment and its mitigation measures.