Study on the Urban Heat Island of Suzhou City Based on Landsat Remote Sensing Data

To study the urban heat island of Suzhou city in the urbanization,multi-temporal Landsat TM images were adopted to the land thermal environment. First,landcover image in 1986,1995 and 2004 were generated using CART classification trees respectively. Land surface temperatures were retrieved by the single channel method and then normalized and scaled into 6 grades to eliminate temporal climate differences. The effect of heat island and changes of thermal environment were studied based on landcover image and urban heat island intensity maps. The results show that the urban heat island area index increase by 4.87% in 1986,11.10% in 1995 and 37.87% in 2004. According to the study result,the heat island effect of Suzhou city has been expanding and strengthening significantly since 1980s,and the urbanization makes the effect much stronger.