Monitoring Long-Term Changes of Urban Surface Temperature Using Time-Series Land Cover and Remote Sensing Data Across 50 Major Cities in the United States

The increase of developed land changes the Earth’s ecosystems and, in doing so, impacts the natural environment and further affects the services it provides to humans. Urban growth and associated land cover transitions alter the thermal and physical properties of the land surface, resulting in surface temperature change in urban areas. In this study, we integrated both land cover and surface temperature information to characterize surface temperature spatiotemporal variations using the recently available time series of Landsat land surface temperature and annual land change products. We analyzed over thirty-year trends of land surface temperature (LST) in urban and surrounding non-urban lands. We found that the transitions of different land cover types to urban affected urban LST trends differently, and further impacted the temporal trend of urban heat island intensity.