A Geographically Weighted Regression Approach to Understanding Urbanization Impacts on Urban Warming and Cooling: A Case Study of Las Vegas
1
Department of Geography, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA
2
Urban Big Data Centre, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RZ, UK
3
Spatial Analysis Research Center, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-5302, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2020, 12(2), 222; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12020222
Received: 31 October 2019 / Revised: 12 December 2019 / Accepted: 3 January 2020 / Published: 9 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing of Urban Ecology and Sustainability)
A surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect is one of the most significant consequences of urbanization. Great progress has been made in evaluating the SUHI with cross-sectional studies performed in a number of cities across the globe. Few studies; however, have focused on the spatiotemporal changes in an area over a long period of time. Using multi-temporal remote sensing data sets, this study examined the spatiotemporal changes of the SUHI intensity in Las Vegas, Nevada, over a 15-year period from 2001 to 2016. We applied the geographically weighted regression (GWR) and advanced statistical approaches to investigating the SUHI variation in relation to several important biophysical indicators in the region. The results show that (1) Las Vegas had experienced a significant increase in the SUHI over the 15 years, (2) Vegetation and large and small water bodies in the city can help mitigate the SUHI effect and the cooling effect of vegetation had increased continuously from 2001 to 2016, (3) An urban heat sink (UHS) was identified in developed areas with low to moderate intensity, and (4) Increased surface temperatures were mainly driven by the urbanization-induced land conversions occurred over the 15 years. Findings from this study will inspire thoughts on practical guidelines for SUHI mitigation in a fast-growing desert city.
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Keywords:
surface urban heat island; geographically weighted regression; surface urban heat sink; urbanization; Las Vegas
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Wang, Z.; Fan, C.; Zhao, Q.; Myint, S.W. A Geographically Weighted Regression Approach to Understanding Urbanization Impacts on Urban Warming and Cooling: A Case Study of Las Vegas. Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 222.
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