Spatiotemporal trends of urban heat island effect along the urban development intensity gradient in China

- Spatiotemporal trends of the UHI effect (ΔT) were analyzed in China.
- ΔT varied greatly across cities, UDI zones, and time periods.
- ΔT-UDI patterns were mostly in linear form except few convex or concave ones.
- ΔT increased or remained stable from 2003 to 2012 for most cities.
- Caution should be paid to the methods to quantify UHI intensity over large areas.

Urban heat island (UHI) represents a major anthropogenic modification to the Earth system and its relationship with urban development is poorly understood at a regional scale. Using Aqua MODIS data and Landsat TM/ETM + images, we examined the spatiotemporal trends of the UHI effect (ΔT, relative to the rural reference) along the urban development intensity (UDI) gradient in 32 major Chinese cities from 2003 to 2012. We found that the daytime and nighttime ΔT increased significantly (p < 0.05, mostly in linear form) along a rising UDI for 27 and 30 out of 32 cities, respectively. More rapid increases were observed in the southeastern and northwestern parts of China in the day and night, respectively. Moreover, the ΔT trends differed greatly by season and during daytime in particular. The ΔT increased more rapidly in summer than in winter during the day and the reverse occurred at night for most cities. Inter-annually, the ΔT increased significantly in about one-third of the cities during both the day and night times from 2003 to 2012, especially in suburban areas (0.25 < UDI ≤ 0.5), with insignificant trends being observed for most of the remaining cities. We also found that the ΔT patterns along the UDI gradient were largely controlled by local climate-vegetation conditions, while that across years were dominated by human activities. Our results highlight the strong and highly diverse urbanization effects on local climate cross China and offer limitations on how these certain methods should be used to quantify UHI intensity over large areas. Furthermore, the impacts of urbanization on climate are complex, thus future research efforts should focus more toward direct observation and physical-based modeling to make credible predictions of the effects.