Object-oriented tracking of the dynamic behavior of urban heat islands

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon occurring within urban areas or city-clusters is increasingly becoming a severe problem in the urbanization process. Previous research mainly focusing on static UHI modeled at fixed time instants is not capable to track the evolutionary process of the UHIs in both time and space domains. This research designs an object-oriented dynamic model to reconstruct the evolutionary process of UHIs. Each UHI is modeled as a spatiotemporal field-object with its own life-cycle. The dynamic behavior of an UHI is defined by a series of filiations (e.g. expansion and contraction). The model was implemented in an object-relational database and applied to air temperature data collected from weather stations in hourly basis over 7 days. The behaviors of UHI were extracted from the data. Results suggest that the model can effectively identify different behaviors and status of UHIs, and reveal the spatiotemporal behavior of each of them.