Attenuating the surface Urban Heat Island within the Local Thermal Zones through land surface modification

Abstract

Inefficient mitigation of excessive heat is attributed to the discrepancy between the scope of climate research and conventional planning practice. This study approaches this problem at both domains. Generally, the study, on one hand, claims that the climate research of the temperature phenomenon should be at local scale, where implementation of planning and design strategies can be more feasible. On the other hand, the study suggests that the land surface factors should be organized into zones or patches, which conforms to the urban planning and design manner. Thus in each zone, the land surface composition of those excessively hot places can be compared to the zonal standard. The comparison gives guidance to the modification of the land surface factors at the target places. Specifically, this study concerns the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in Wuhan, China. The land surface is classified into Local Thermal Zones (LTZ). The specifications of temperature sensitive land surface factors are relative homogeneous in each zone and so is the variation of the LST. By extending the city scale analysis of Urban Heat Island into local scale, the Local Surface Urban Heat Islands (LSUHIs) are extracted. Those places in each zone that constantly maintain as LSUHI and exceed the homogenous LST variation are considered as target places or hotspots with higher mitigation or adaptation priority. The operation is equivalent to attenuate the abnormal LST variation in each zone. The framework is practical in the form of prioritization and zoning, and mitigation strategies are essentially operated locally.