Relationships between land cover and the surface urban heat island: seasonal variability and effects of spatial and thematic resolution of land cover data on predicting land surface temperatures

We investigated the seasonal variability of the relationships between land surface temperature (LST) and land use/land cover (LULC) variables, and how the spatial and thematic resolutions of LULC variables affect these relationships. We derived LST data from Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) images acquired from four different seasons. We used three LULC datasets: (1) 0.6 m resolution land cover data; (2) 30 m resolution land cover data (NLCD 2001); and (3) 30 m resolution Normalized Difference Vegetation Index data derived from the same ETM+ images (though from different bands) used for LST calculation. We developed ten models to evaluate effects of spatial and thematic resolution of LULC data on the observed relationships between LST and LULC variables for each season. We found that the directions of the effects of LULC variables on predicting LST were consistent across seasons, but the magnitude of effects, varied by season, providing the strongest predictive capacity during summer and the weakest during winter. Percent of imperviousness was the best predictor on LST with relatively consistent explanatory power across seasons, which alone explained approximately 50 % of the total variation in LST in winter, and up to 77.9 % for summer. Vegetation related variables, particularly tree canopy, were good predictor of LST during summer and fall. Vegetation, particularly tree canopy, can significantly reduce LST. The spatial resolution of LULC data appeared not to substantially affect relationships between LST and LULC variables. In contrast, increasing thematic resolution generally enhanced the explanatory power of LULC on LST, but not to a substantial degree.