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Abstract:
Rapid development of urban areas has witnessed a replacement of natural vegetation cover with impervious materials such as buildings and paved surfaces. This has a significant impact on the local and regional thermal environment and climate due to modification of heat energy balance. Detecting impervious surface in urban areas for understanding the impact has become more urgent as conventional methods for estimating impervious surface are very limited. Fortunately, satellite remote sensing technology offers considerable promise to meet this requirement, and methods to discriminate impervious lands in satellite imagery have been proposed for last a few decades. Among them, the normalized difference impervious surface index (NDISI) is a cost-effective method for fast estimating impervious surface over large areas. The application of the index to Landsat TM imagery of Xiamen City in southeastern China has shown that the index can effectively extract impervious surfaces from multi-temporal satellite images. Moreover, the index can be used as an indicator to investigate the impact of impervious surface on urban thermal environment by examination of its quantitative relationship with land surface temperature, vegetation, and water.
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