THE SURFACE URBAN HEAT ISLAND IN 285 CHINESE CITIES: SPATIAL PATTERN AND DRIVER

Urban heat island effect is a hot topic in urban environment change. Traditional studies mainly focused on one city or several specific cities, hardly comparing the differences in the national scale. In this study, an obvious gap of land surface temperature (LST) was found between urban area and its surroudings by analyzing LST dynamics along the urban-rural gradient in China. Meanwhile, we explored the spatiotemporal pattern of the urban heat island intensity (UHII) in 285 Chinese cities during 2000-2015, which showed the UHII in cities gradually declined from east to west, and the UHII of nearly half of the cities increased during 2000-2015. After these, a weak positive relationship between city sizes and UHIIs was found, which may resulted from the different natural conditions in the national scale.