Analysis of mechanism for formation of urban thermal environment

The transformation of natural landscapes into highly human-dominated environments is placing increased pressure on local and global ecosystems. One direct result of this transformation, so called "Urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon", is regarded as one of the most pervasive environmental problems nowadays. There is increasing evidence that the existence of UHI may bring a lot of troubles to the urban environment, further influence the sustainable development of urban and force urban planners to focus on the broad research on UHI. This paper based on TM image, choosing Shanghai as study area, analyzes the impact factors of urban thermal environment and attempts to explain the mechanism of urban thermal environment by a few but effective factors. For the sake of the accuracy and accordance with actuality, Principal Components Analysis is applied after spatial autocorrelation of the factors is eliminated. The results show that urban construction, industry distribution, land surface characters and landscape diversity become the most important factors to the formation and mechanism of urban thermal environment of Shanghai. This result can undoubtedly provide an excellent platform from which we can launch other investigations to better our environment. Meanwhile, the understanding of mechanism of urban thermal environment and more, taking measures to lessen the intensity of urban thermal environment are of great significance to improve life-quality of humankind and further maintain the sustainable development of urban.