Evaluating the influence of urban form on air temperature: a GIS-based local climate zone classification and urban heat island analysis in Milwaukee

Local Climate Zone (LCZ) is a comprehensive and widely used systematic method for classifying urban landscapes. It has been employed to investigate the relationship between urban form and local climate differences. This paper applies the LCZ mapping technique in the city of Milwaukee using a GIS-based classification method to categorize buildings and land cover types. A comparison was made between the accuracy of non-GIS-based LCZ results and GIS-based LCZ results. The findings indicate that the GIS-based method for classifying buildings produced significantly more accurate results than the non-GIS-based method. The visualized result map also illustrates a strong relationship between land cover types and air temperature. Using evening air temperature data from the Urban Heat Island (UHI) map created by UW-Madison on 22 July 2022, a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to validate the impacts of LCZ and building height on air temperatures. These findings indicate that while both LCZ and building height independently influence evening air temperature, they do not interact in a way that alters each other's impact on the urban microclimate.