Surface thermal analysis of North Brabant cities and neighbourhoods during heat waves

Journal Article (2016)
Author(s)

Leyre Echevarria Icaza (TU Delft - OLD Urban Compositions)

Franklin van der Hoeven (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft - OLD Urban Design)

Andy van den Dobbelsteen (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)

Research Group
OLD Urban Compositions
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.6092/1970-9870/3741 Final published version
More Info
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Publication Year
2016
Language
English
Research Group
OLD Urban Compositions
Issue number
1
Volume number
9
Pages (from-to)
63-87
Downloads counter
230
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Abstract

The urban heat island effect is often associated with large metropolises. However, in the Netherlands even small cities will be affected by the phenomenon in the future (Hove et al., 2011), due to the dispersed or mosaic urbanisation patterns in particularly the southern part of the country: the province of North Brabant. This study analyses the average night time land surface temperature (LST) of 21 North-Brabant urban areas through 22 satellite images retrieved by Modis 11A1 during the 2006 heat wave and uses Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper to map albedo and normalized difference temperature index (NDVI) values. Albedo, NDVI and imperviousness are found to play the most relevant role in the increase of nighttime LST. The surface cover cluster analysis of these three parameters reveals that the 12 “urban living environment” categories used in the region of North Brabant can actually be reduced to 7 categories, which simplifies the design guidelines to improve the surface
thermal behaviour of the different neighbourhoods thus reducing the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in existing medium size cities and future developments
adjacent to those cities.