RESEARCH ARTICLE Understanding the effects of the impervious surfaces pattern on land surface temperature in an urban area Qin NIE (✉) 1 , Jianhua XU 2 1 Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen 361024, China 2 The Research Center for East-West Cooperation in China, The Key Laboratory of GIScience of the Ministry of Education of China, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China © Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract It is well known that urban impervious surface (IS) has a warming effect on urban land surface temperature (LST). However, the inﬂuence of an IS’s structure, components, and spatial distribution on LST has rarely been quantitatively studied within strictly urban areas. Using ETM + remote sensing images from the downtown area of Shanghai, China in 2010, this study characterized and quantiﬁed the inﬂuence of the IS spatial pattern on LST by selecting the percent cover of each IS cover feature and ten conﬁguration metrics. The IS fraction was estimated by linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA), and LST was retrieved using a mono-window algorithm. The results indicate that high fraction IS cover features account for the majority of the study area. The high fraction IS cover features are widely distributed and concentrated in groups, which is similar with that of high temperature zones. Both the percent composition and the conﬁguration of IS cover features greatly affect the magnitude of LST, but the percent composition is a more important factor in determining LST than the conﬁguration of those features. The signiﬁcances and effects of the given conﬁguration variables on LST vary greatly among IS cover features. Keywords urban impervious surfaces, land surface temperature, spatial pattern, Shanghai city 1 Introduction Recent estimates indicate that more than 50% of the world human population lives in urban areas (United Nations, 2006). Urbanization has become the most signiﬁcant human activity process since the 20th century. Rapid urbanization changes land cover types from permeable land to anthropogenic impervious surfaces (IS) (Meiyap- pan and Jain, 2012). Urban IS have a higher solar radiation absorption, a greater thermal conductivity and capacity for releasing heat stored during the day and night. Therefore, a well-documented consequence of the growth in IS area due to urbanization is the formation of an urban heat island (UHI) that is a major component of urban climate. With the development of airborne or satellite thermal infrared remote sensing, urban IS can be estimated using remote sensing technology (Slonecker et al., 2001; Weng, 2012), and the surface UHI is typically characterized as urban land surface temperature (LST) (Hope et al. 2005).The relationship between IS and LST has become increasingly important as the urban IS continue to increase and has attracted great attention from scholars at home and abroad. A large number of studies have sought to elucidate the relationship between IS and LST, which might be summarized into three aspects: qualitative description and comparison based on spatial distribution of IS and LST (Xiao et al., 2007); quantitative statistical analysis based on random sampling methods (Yang et al., 2005; Weng et al., 2007; Xian et al., 2007; Yuan et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2009a); and studies of the scale effects of their relationship (Yue, 2005; Meng, 2010). These studies have contributed to the understanding of the relationship between urban IS and LST, but most of them so far only focus on the quantitative relationship between them, without taking spatial pattern into account. The current understanding of the relationship between IS and LST is far from complete. In urban areas, the composition and structure of urban canopies are crucial factors inﬂuencing LST. Despite the increasing interest in the relationship between LST and urban materials and landscape compositions, especially between LST and vegetation abundance (Weng et al., 2004; Wong and Yu, 2005; Zhang et al., 2009b), a critical area remains poorly understand. It is well known that urban IS has a warming effect on LST. However, the inﬂuence of different types of IS structures, components, and spatial Received November 19, 2013; accepted March 12, 2014 E-mail: nieqinhongyi@163.com Front. Earth Sci. DOI 10.1007/s11707-014-0459-2