title: The footprint of urban heat island effect in China.
abstract: Urban heat island (UHI) is one major anthropogenic modification to the Earth system that transcends its physical boundary. Using MODIS data from 2003 to 2012, we showed that the UHI effect decayed exponentially toward rural areas for majority of the 32 Chinese cities. We found an obvious urban/rural temperature "cliff", and estimated that the footprint of UHI effect (FP, including urban area) was 2.3 and 3.9 times of urban size for the day and night, respectively, with large spatiotemporal heterogeneities. We further revealed that ignoring the FP may underestimate the UHI intensity in most cases and even alter the direction of UHI estimates for few cities. Our results provide new insights to the characteristics of UHI effect and emphasize the necessity of considering city- and time-specific FP when assessing the urbanization effects on local climate.
authors.affiliation: 1] Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Agricultural Meteorology, and College of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China [2] College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Decheng
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Shuqing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Agricultural Meteorology, and College of Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.
authors.forename: Liangxia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Raleigh, NC 27606, USA.
authors.forename: Ge
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Center for Forest Disturbance Science, Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
authors.forename: Yongqiang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu