ABSTRACT
Modifications to temperature have received greatest attention because of practical implications for human comfort, morbidity, mortality, air pollution, ecology, or energy use with its potential link to the generation of greenhouse gases. It is therefore unsurprising that the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon, which characterizes sustained urban warmth compared to its rural surroundings, has established itself as an iconic feature of the urban climate. Understanding urban climate scales is fundamental for characterizing, observing, and modeling UHIs. Urban landscape typing according to the important urban climate controls, namely, fabric, land cover, structure and metabolism, provides a useful approach to classify discrete areas of cities with distinct climate modifications. Urban structures, materials, land cover, and human activity result in surface energy fluxes which greatly differ in a city compared to those of surrounding rural areas. Urbanization introduces radically different materials in terms of their radiative and thermal properties when compared to natural land cover.
