Identifying the pattern trends of temperature in a city of a difficult and challenging subject, though through the use of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), our researchers have shown the extent of the variability across a major city can be tremendous. Using data for London, it has been shown that there is a high degree of sensitivity to local meteorological effects and daily cycles.
Comparison of the Urban Heat Island Intensity (UHII) [the maximum difference between urban and rural temperatures during one day] in a statistically robust manner showed that the 2003 heatwave UHII data sets for both image surface and ground air temperatures did not exhibit significantly greater intensities than the other years under consideration. This is in contrast to other work on this topic (e.g. Cheval et al., 2009; Tomlinson et al., 2010) that indicates that not only is the UHII metric a relatively poor means by which to distinguish between a heatwave summer in London, but also the need for further scrutiny of the use of the UHII.
The full paper can be downloaded by following the link:
Holderness, T., Barr, S.L., Dawson, R.J. and Hall, J.W. (2013) An evaluation of thermal Earth observation for characterising urban heatwave event dynamics using the urban heat island intensity metric, Int. J. Remote Sensing, 34(3):864–884
Please contact Stuart Barr for more information.
