Cities play a pivotal role in global climate change, primarily driven by the continuous replacement of natural to heat-absorbed surfaces, soaring energy consumption, and escalating waste emissions. As cities sprawl and population increase, urban morphology, including physical layout, structure and form, undergoes significant transformations. These transformations pose great challenges to urban thermal environment, which further exacerbate heat-related health issues. A comprehensive understanding of how urban morphology influences local heat generation and dissipation is necessary for optimizing the urban design, minimizing cost and efforts, and preventing the adverse effects on urban ecosystems. Recent advances in remote sensing have opened up supply possibilities and opportunities for understanding the geometrical, physical, environmental and socioeconomic interactions at various scales in the highly heterogeneous region, and further for developing efficient adaptation strategies for urban temperature mitigation.
This Research Topic welcome contributions on the novel methods, experiments, findings, opinions and critical reviews in the field of urban morphology and its impact on the urban heat environment, with a particular focus on their associations across spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, we encourage interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g., remote sensing, GIS, landscape ecology, atmosphere science, urban planning, and others), to advance our understanding of cities, and to guide the transformation of urban morphology to improve urban heat environment.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
• Urban morphology options;
• Spatiotemporal observations of urban morphology and heat environment using satellites/UAVs;
• Mapping local climate zone in relation to urban morphological features;
• Methodology to improve resolution and accuracy of land surface temperature;
• Modelling, assessment and prediction of urban heat islands;
• Impacts of urbanization on urban morphology;
• Multi-scale effect of urban morphology on the heat environment;
• Surface heat transfer and the dependence on urban morphology;
• Urban design in relation to urban morphology and urban heat.
Keywords: urban morphology, urban heat islands, spatiotemporal dynamics, scale effect, satellites/UAVs, sustainable city design
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
