Urban Heat Island Analysis

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.