Urban percent impervious surface and its relationship with land surface temperature in Yantai City, China

This study investigated percent impervious surface area (PISA) extracted by a four-endmember normalized spectral mixture analysis (NSMA) method and evaluated the reliability of PISA as an indicator of land surface temperature (LST). Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images for Yantai city, eastern China obtained from USGS were used as the main data source. The results demonstrated that four-endmember NSMA method performed better than the typical three-endmember one, and there was a strong linear relationship between LST and PISA for the two images, which suggest percent impervious surface area provides an alternative parameter for analyzing LST quantitatively in urban areas.