Diego Rybski: "We systematically quantify the UHI intensity for the largest 5,000 city clusters in Europe by combining land-cover and surface skin temperature data. In order to characterize the urban form, we also determine for each city the fractal dimensions - as a measure of compactness - and the anisometry - as a measure to which extent a city's length is greater than its width. As in our previous publication (B.Zhou et al., GRL, 2013) we consider far more cities than any other study in the field, which enables us to perform a profound statistical analysis of the influences.
It turns out that the properties (size, fractal dimension, and anisometry) are correlated so that we had to perform multi-linear regression with interactions. For typical cities in our sample, we find that city size has the strongest (raising) influence on the UHI intensity, followed by the fractal dimension (raising) and anisometry (reducing). We conclude that from the point of view of UHI alleviation, small, disperse, and stretched cities are preferable."
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