Compare methods

	Urban Canyon Analysis	Urban Heat Island Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1982
Originator	Timothy R. Oke	Tim R. Oke (energetic basis of the UHI)
Type	Pipeline for characterising street-canyon geometry and its microclimatic effects	Measurement of the temperature excess of urban areas relative to their rural surroundings
Seminal source	Oke, T. R. (1988). Street design and urban canopy layer climate. Energy and Buildings, 11(1-3), 103–113.	Oke, T. R. (1982). The energetic basis of the urban heat island. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 108(455), 1–24.
Aliases	Street Canyon Analysis, Canyon Aspect Ratio Analysis, Urban Canopy Layer Analysis, H/W Ratio Analysis	UHI Analysis, Urban Heat Island Intensity, Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) Analysis, Land Surface Temperature Differential
Related	4	4
Summary	Urban canyon analysis characterises a street flanked by buildings as a 'canyon' and studies how its geometry — chiefly the ratio of building height to street width — governs airflow, radiation, temperature, and pollutant dispersion within it. The single most important descriptor is the aspect ratio H/W, which determines whether wind skims over the top, recirculates inside, or interacts between adjacent canyons. The framework was set out by Timothy Oke's 1988 paper on street design and the urban canopy layer, which tied canyon geometry to the microclimate of the air below roof level.	Urban heat island (UHI) analysis quantifies how much warmer cities are than the rural land around them, a difference driven by impervious surfaces, reduced vegetation, waste heat, and street-canyon geometry that traps radiation. The intensity of the effect is defined simply as the urban-minus-rural temperature differential, a framework given its physical, energy-balance foundation by Tim Oke in 1982. Modern analysis increasingly maps the surface UHI from thermal satellite imagery, converting radiance to brightness temperature and then to land surface temperature so the heat island can be observed continuously across an entire metropolitan area rather than at a few weather stations.