Examining the impacts of urbanization on surface radiation using Landsat imagery

Metropolitan Beijing is facing many environmental problems such as haze and urban heat island due to the rapid urbanization. Surface shortwave, longwave, and net radiations are key components of the surface-atmosphere radiation budget. Since megacities are affected by the thermal radiation of complex landscape structures and atmospheric environments, quantitative and spatially explicit retrieval from remotely sensed data remains a challenge. We collected the surface radiation fluxes from seven fixed sites representing different land-use types to calibrate the local parameters for remotely sensed retrieval of net radiation. We proposed a remote sensing-based surface radiation retrieval method by embedding the underlying land covers and integrating the observational data. The improved method is feasible to accurately retrieve surface radiation and delineate spatial characteristics in metropolitan areas. The accuracy evaluation indicated that the difference between remotely sensed and in situ observed net radiation ranged within 0 similar to +/- 40 W center dot m(-2). The root mean squared error of the estimated net surface radiation was 32.71 W center dot m(-2). The strongly spatial heterogeneity of surface radiation components in metropolitan Beijing was closely related to land-cover patterns from urban area to outskirts. We also found that the surface net radiation had a decreasing trend from 1984 to 2014, and the net radiation in the urban area was lower than that in the outskirts. According to the surface radiation budgets, urbanization resulted in the cooling effect in net radiation flux in the daytime, which was stemmed from low atmospheric transmittances from massive aerosol concentration and high surface albedo from light building materials.