Analysis Of Relationship Between Urban Thermal Pattern And Land Use/Land Cover-Taking Xuzhou City As An Example

Owing to the ability of depicting the spatial distribution of land surface temperatures (LST) and land cover, remote sensing images have been used to analyze the relationship between urban heat island (UHI) and land use/cover changes (LUCC) in recent years. As one prominent feature of LUCC in urbanization process, urban roads are extended and expanded to form complex urban thermal corridors. This study estimates the relationship by investigating urban thermal environmental impacts caused by LUCC in the buffer areas of the urban roads. Multi-temporal remote sensing images, including Landsat TM/ETM+ data from September 19, 1987, September 6, 1994 September 14, 2000 and August 12, 2005 in Xuzhou city, are employed to explore land use types and derive land surface temperatures at different period. An integrating classification method based on decision tree classifier and object-oriented method is used for improving land cover classification accuracy. By analyzing the relationship between brightness temperature and vegetation indices, e.g., normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), the relationship between UHI and LUCC is estimated quantitatively. Change results and regression analysis show that total transformation rate of LUCC behaves linearly decreased with increasing distance to roads while the transformation rate from other types to building/road has a negative exponent relation with the distance to roads. Analysis to urban green space and thermal landscape indicates that brightness temperature is negatively correlated with the. NDVI but positively related with NDBI. It is concluded that urban vegetation system plays a unique role in monitoring the urban thermal environment.