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On the statistics of urban heat island intensity
Author(s) -
Zhou B.,
Rybski D.,
Kropp J. P.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2013gl057320
Subject(s) - urban heat island , intensity (physics) , land cover , environmental science , cluster (spacecraft) , climatology , physical geography , meteorology , geography , land use , geology , physics , civil engineering , quantum mechanics , computer science , engineering , programming language
We perform a systematic study of all cities in Europe to assess the Urban Heat Island (UHI) intensity by means of remotely sensed land surface temperature data. Defining cities as spatial clusters of urban land cover, we investigate the relationships of the UHI intensity, with the cluster size and the temperature of the surroundings. Our results show that in Europe, the UHI intensity in summer has a strong correlation with the cluster size, which can be well fitted by an empirical sigmoid model. Furthermore, we find a novel seasonality of the UHI intensity for individual clusters in the form of hysteresis‐like curves. We characterize the shape and identify apparent regional patterns.