Monitoring of Regional Land Surface Temperature in city by Wireless Sensing Network

Abstract:

Land surface temperature (LST) is an important environmental factor. The precise monitoring data of LST can provide crucial support for further ecological researches such as the environment change and urban heat island. The Wireless Sensing Network (WSN) is a kind of modern information technology which integrates sensor technology, automatic control technology with data network transmission, storage, processing and analysis technology. As a new kind of data collection method, WSN is innovatively applied to monitor regional LST in different land cover types of city in this study. The LST data with high temporal resolution is obtained from temperature sensors of WSN. The land cover types of city are extracted from WorldView-II image with high resolution. The Southeast University Wuxi Branch campus and its surroundings which covers 2 km² is chosen as the study area in Wuxi city, Jiangsu province, China. WSN is established to continuously monitor LST in real-time for one week. Then, the heterogeneous pattern of LST is investigated at a fine spatial and temporal scale based on different land cover types. The result shows LST of streets is higher than LST of campus in the daytime, but lower than LST of campus at night. The spatial heterogeneity of LST in the campus is not significant. This is because the number of vehicle was larger in the daytime than that at night, while the population of campus in day and night almost having little change. Notably, the influence of plant activities (e.g. photosynthesis and respiration) on LST can be detected by WSN. This study is a new attempt to monitor regional environment of city by WSN technology. Moreover, compared to traditional methods, WSN technology can improve the detection of LST with finer temporal and spatial resolution.