A Study on Urban Thermal Field of Shanghai Using Multi-source Remote Sensing Data

Landsat TM/ETM and MODIS satellite remote sensing data from 1995 to 2012 are used to study Shanghai’s urban heat island (UHI) in China from the perspectives of time and space. Furthermore the UHI characteristics are analyzed in terms of landscape ecology theory and the urban heat island effect ratio (UHIER). The results show that: in the time sequence, the land brightness temperature (LBT) of Shanghai in 2000 is the strongest and the one in 2003 is the weakest. The urban area LBT has continued to decline since 2003, but for the entire Shanghai, it has had an overall increase. In the spatial distribution, LBT structure is mainly dominated by urban area from 1995 to 2000; but since the rapid development of built-up area of Pudong, Songjiang, Minhang and Jiading Districts in 2000, the LBT landscape pattern which was primarily urban area-centered and multicenter built-up area-supplemented has been gradually formed.