Estimation of the Relationship Between Urban Vegetation Configuration and Land Surface Temperature with Remote Sensing

Urban vegetation can help decrease Land surface temperature (LST) to mitigate urban heat island (UHI) effects. The relationship between LST and urban vegetation amount has been extensively documented. However, few studies have examined the relationship between LST and urban vegetation configuration and particularly whether the relationship changes across scales. In this study, LST in Changchun, China was obtained from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) data and then correlated to urban vegetation amount and configuration information derived from high-spatial-resolution SPOT satellite data to uncover the relationship between urban vegetation configuration and LST. These results suggest that not only by increasing the amounts of urban vegetation, but also by optimizing their spatial pattern of urban vegetation can decrease LST. Given a fixed amount of urban vegetation, LST can be significantly decreased or increased by different configuration of urban vegetation. Besides the relationship between LST and urban vegetation configuration is complex and scale dependant and spatial scales should be considered when we try to explore the relationship between them. These findings can deepen the understanding of their interactions between LST and urban vegetation and provide useful information for urban planners about how to arrange urban vegetation at the landscape level to improve urban thermal environment.