THE ROLES OF URBAN BUILDINGS AND VEGETATION IN ADJUSTING SEASONAL AND DAILY AIR TEMPERATURE

Abstract. Exploring the spatiotemporal patterns of the relationships between urban indicators and urban temperature is essential to improve the mitigation effectiveness when we intend to adjust built environment for moderating urban thermal environment. In this study, RS, GIS technology and statistical methods were involved to investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of the impacts of urban buildings and vegetation on Air Temperature (AT). Building Density (BD) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) are the indicators for urban buildings and vegetation respectively. The objectives of this study are: 1) to determine an appropriate scale for examining the building-AT relationships and vegetation-AT relationships; 2) to explore the seasonal and daily characteristics of these relationships; and 3) to compare the effects of urban buildings and vegetation. The results show that, for both summer and winter, a scale of 200–250 m is optimal for examining building-AT relationships, and 960–1020 m is the desirable scale for studying vegetation-AT relationships. Based on the optimal scales, we find that for both buildings and vegetation, they only significantly impact night-time temperature in both summer and winter. For seasonal comparison, the building-AT relationships and vegetation-AT relationships are relatively stronger in summer than in winter, which are indicated by R-square of the regression results. When comparing the effects of urban building and vegetation, we find that increasing vegetation is more effective than reduce buildings to achieve the same air temperature reduction. Our findings are conducive to generating space-time targeted Urban Heat Island (UHI) mitigation strategies.