Remote Sensing, Vol. 10, Pages 1965: Assessing the Effects of Land-Use Types in Surface Urban Heat Islands for Developing Comfortable Living in Hanoi City (Remote Sensing)

Hanoi City of Vietnam changes quickly, especially after its state implemented its Master Plan 2030 for the city’s sustainable development in 2011. Then, a number of environmental issues are brought up in response to the master plan’s implementation. Among the issues, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect that tends to cause negative impacts on people’s heath becomes one major problem for exploitation to seek for mitigation solutions. In this paper, we investigate the land surface thermal signatures among different land-use types in Hanoi. The surface UHI (SUHI) that characterizes the consequences of the UHI effect is also studied and quantified. Note that our SUHI is defined as the magnitude of temperature differentials between any two land-use types (a more general way than that typically proposed in the literature), including urban and suburban. Relationships between main land-use types in terms of composition, percentage coverage, surface temperature, and SUHI in inner Hanoi in the recent two years 2016 and 2017, were proposed and examined. High correlations were found between the percentage coverage of the land-use types and the land surface temperature (LST). Then, a regression model for estimating the intensity of SUHI from the Landsat 8 imagery was derived, through analyzing the correlation between land-use composition and LST for the year 2017. The model was validated successfully for the prediction of the SUHI for another hot day in 2016. For example, the transformation of a chosen area of 161 ha (1.61 km2) from vegetation to built-up between two years, 2016 and 2017, can result in enhanced thermal contrast by 3.3 °C. The function of the vegetation to lower the LST in a hot environment is evident. The results of this study suggest that the newly developed model provides an opportunity for urban planners and designers to develop measures for adjusting the LST, and for mitigating the consequent effects of UHIs by managing the land use composition and percentage coverage of the individual land-use type.