Modeling effects of urban spatial structure on urban thermal environment - Integrating satellite image processing and metric model analysis

Using a satellite image processing and econometric model, the paper aims to contribute to urban surface structure efforts of addressing the question of how urban thermal environment management should be carried out. The objective is to reveal quantitatively the effect of the spatial variation of city's structure on nearsurface air temperature, which related to canopy layer heat island. The whole system mainly consists of three connected systems: automatic digital terrain surface model generation from ALOS PRISM satellite images, which has the ability to provide precise and reliable urban spatial structure parameters, and modeling the relation between urban surface structure and the near-surface air temperature variation within urban area. The model is developed based on temperature data collecting at 27 sites in Sendai, Japan. All related arguments for model specification and evaluation have been done thoroughly in this research. The results indicated that parameters related to urban spatial structure are important for governing temperature variations in urban area.