Jie Cao

University of Science and Technology of China | USTC · School of Life Sciences

Human health, energy and comfort are determined by the climate that remains in the physical environment. Regarding urban climate, few studies assess the urban heat island effect, heat stress, and public health as geographical representations. This study seeks to fill this gap by selecting Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Shenzhen, China, comparatively, two...

An urban-rural gradient is an effective tool for analyzing urbanization patterns and their impacts on social-ecological systems. However, the prevailing single indicators rarely combine vertical (3-D) spatial structures to depict complex urbanization patterns along the urban-rural gradient from multiple scales. We developed an approach that integra...

Previous studies have shown that changes in local land cover can significantly influence air temperature. What remains unaddressed is whether, and at which point, such within-city changes would become insignificant with cities continuing to expand. Here, we identify annual urban expansion and local land cover change in Beijing from 1985 to 2018, us...

Cities worldwide are expecting more intense and frequent extreme heat events (EHEs) with climate change and urban growth. While previous studies have shown large intra-urban spatial variations in temperature, little is known regarding how EHEs were spatially distributed within a city. Here, taking Shenzhen, a rapidly urbanizing megacity in China as...

Using land surface temperatures (LST) derived from remotely sensed data, numerous studies have shown that not only urban areas are warmer than surrounding rural areas, but within urban areas, there are large spatial variations in temperature. Few studies, however, have investigated the spatial variation of air temperature within a city. Using air t...