ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Download
Publications Copernicus
Download
Citation
Articles | Volume III-2
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-III-2-3-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-III-2-3-2016
02 Jun 2016
 | 02 Jun 2016

TRACKING THE SPATIAL EVOLUTION OF URBAN HEAT ISLANDS

Rui Zhu, Eric Guilbert, and Man Sing Wong

Keywords: Spatiotemporal data modeling; Urban heat islands; Remote sensing

Abstract. The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon occurring in the urban areas or city-clusters is increasingly becoming a severe problem in the urbanization process. Previous research mainly rely on grid analysis techniques to study temperature data from images recorded at fixed time instants. The evolutionary process of UHI in both time and space has not been investigated yet. This research designs an object-oriented spatiotemporal model to reconstruct the evolution of UHI and provide a qualitative interpretation. Each UHI is modeled as a spatiotemporal field object with it own life cycle. Dynamic behavior of an UHI is defined by sequences of spatial changes (e.g. contraction or expansion) and topological transformations (e.g. merge or split). The model is implemented in an object-relational database and applied to air temperature data collected from weather stations every hour over three days. UHIs with their behavior were extracted from the data. Results suggest that the model can effectively track and provide a qualitative description of the UHI evolution.