Relationship between Land Surface Temperature and Land Use/Land Cover in Taiyuan, China

Four Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) / Operational Land Imager (OLI) remote sensing images in 2000, 2004, 2011 and 2014 are used and a single-window algorithm is adopted to quantitatively retrieve land surface temperatures (LST) of Taiyuan City. A density slicing method is used to classify the city as an urban heat island. Land use types are classified in combination with a support vector machine. The relationships between LST and land use/land cover types, vegetation coverage and impermeable surfaces are analyzed, and those relationships between surface temperatures and impervious surfaces, vegetation, bare land and water bodies are studied quantitatively. The results show that the influence of the impervious surface on LST is much larger than that of vegetation, bare land and water bodies. The main factors affecting the surface temperature of Taiyuan City in the past 14 years are identified. Although the area of vegetation and bare land has either slightly increased or decreased, the increase in impervious surface area is the direct cause of the urban heat island effect of Taiyuan.