| Abstract: | Great progress has been made on the remote investigation of Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) across multiple time scales. However, limited by the remote sensing models and resolution tradeoff of satellite-derived Land Surface Temperatures (LSTs), currently the hourly regimes of SUHI over typical urban agglomerations in typical seasons remain unclear. Using MODIS imageries as the main data source as well as by incorporating a diurnal temperature cycle model (i.e., INA08), this study, to our knowledge, firstly examined the hourly variations of the spatial pattern and intensity of the SUHIs for the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration in both the summer and winter. The results demonstrated that, in the summer, a general trend of ‘heat island’ was observed for every city during a diurnal cycle. ‘Cold spots’ also occur within most of the cities from around 08:00 to 21:00, mostly as a result of the cooling effect of urban vegetation or water body under strong solar insolation. However, these ‘cold spots’ disappear after 21:00. For this season, the hourly variations of the SUHI intensity are similar to those of the LSTs: They both rise rapidly in the morning, reach the maxima at around 12:00 to 14:00, then gradually decrease and continue until the sunrise of the next day. In the winter, surface urban cool islands (SUCIs) were observed for most of the cities, but these SUCIs mostly disappear during the afternoon to the early evening (around 14:00~17: 00), and then all the cities bounce back to exhibit heat islands. Within this season, the hourly variations of the SUHI intensity differ from those of the LST. There also exist large differences of the hourly variations of SUHI intensity between using the rural area and forest as the non-urban background for estimation of the intensity, with the former reaching its maximum (around 18:00) significantly later than the latter reaching its maximum (around 13:30). |
