Position Paper: Proposing the Transit Heat Island Concept for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Estimation of Urban Heat Islands in Urban Areas

In this article, we discuss how we can advance our knowledge and estimation of the distribution of temperature across urban regions by going beyond the commonly known urban heat islands (UHI) phenomena, which identify the temperature difference between a city and its rural surrounding. Transit heat island (THI) focuses more on the transit routes, which are among the hottest intra-urban land covers. We also discuss new efficient and effective means of collecting data with enough spatio-temporal resolution to model and analyze THI with various smart city applications in mind.