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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Urban Science
Volume 10 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1455047
This article is part of the Research Topic Urban Morphology and Urban Thermal Environment View all 3 articles

Evaluation of spatial interpolation techniques for Urban Heat Island monitoring in small and medium sized cities

Provisionally accepted
Charlotte Brabant Charlotte Brabant Vincent Dubreuil Vincent Dubreuil *Simon Dufour Simon Dufour *
  • University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, Rennes, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The growth of a city is typically accompanied by densification and sprawl, the former through verticalization, urban renewal, and the filling in of empty spaces. All of these activities extend and intensify the urban heat island (UHI), which is quantified in this study as the difference in daily minimum temperature between urban and rural areas. Here, we investigate this phenomenon in the area of Rennes (France) and 17 surrounding cities using the Rennes Urban Network which comprises 93 weather stations. This study aims to (1) determine the optimal method for spatializing UHI in Rennes, France, (2) estimate and spatialize the UHI in the small peri-urban cities surrounding Rennes. For this, we model mean UHI and intense UHI using three methods of interpolation-multi-linear regression (MLR), ordinary kriging (OK), and regression kriging (RK)-based on data from 2022. We find that the RK method is the most suitable overall, with an RMSE of 0.11°C for mean UHI and 0.25°C for intense UHI. This approach allows stochasticity to be taken into account, and thus provides a better representation of UHI variation within Rennes and its peri-urban cities. 1 https://unhabitat.org Code de champ modifié Code de champ modifié Code de champ modifié

    Keywords: Urban Heat Island, Rennes Urban Network, Multi-linear regression, Regression kriging, Ordinary kriging, Medium-size city

    Received: 26 Jun 2024; Accepted: 23 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Brabant, Dubreuil and Dufour. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Vincent Dubreuil, University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, Rennes, France
    Simon Dufour, University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, Rennes, France

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