Object-oriented tracking of the dynamic behavior of urban heat islands

ABSTRACT

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon occurring within urban areas or city-clusters is increasingly becoming a severe problem in the urbanization process. Previous research mainly focusing on static UHI modeled at fixed time instants is not capable to track the evolutionary process of the UHIs in both time and space domains. This research designs an object-oriented dynamic model to reconstruct the evolutionary process of UHIs. Each UHI is modeled as a spatiotemporal field-object with its own life-cycle. The dynamic behavior of an UHI is defined by a series of filiations (e.g. expansion and contraction). The model was implemented in an object-relational database and applied to air temperature data collected from weather stations in hourly basis over 7 days. The behaviors of UHI were extracted from the data. Results suggest that the model can effectively identify different behaviors and status of UHIs, and reveal the spatiotemporal behavior of each of them.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatiotemporal data modeling
• object-oriented modeling
• urban heat islands

Acknowledgments

Dr. Man Sing Wong acknowledges the supports from Early Career Scheme, Hong Kong Research Grants Council Project ID ‘F-PPIQ’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by General Research Fund of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [Grant No. 515513].