Land use/cover changes have caused changes in the
temperature field in the PRD region. Mean temperature of
every land use/cover type was calculated by averaging all
corresponding pixel of a given land use/cover type. Considering
the difference in temperature and atmospheric conditions
between acquisition times of the Landsat images, we used the
UHI intensity in our analysis, rather than looking at the absolute
land surface temperature changes. Since the study region has a
significant portion as open water surface (Table 3) and temperature variation over water tends to be less variable due to its
high heat capacity, we can use the difference in temperature
between urban area and waters as the measure of the UHI
intensity. In this paper, the difference in temperature between
different land use/cover types were also used as references
(Table 4). To help in the interpretation of the results, we also
calculated the mean UHI intensity for each image (Table 4).