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The Zhujiang Delta of South China has experienced a rapid urban expansion over the past two decades due to accelerated economic growth. This paper reports an investigation into the application of the integration of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) for detecting urban growth and assessing its impact on surface temperature in the region. Remote sensing techniques were used to carry out land use/cover change detection by using multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper data. Urban growth patterns were analysed by using a GIS-based modelling approach. The integration of remote sensing and GIS was further applied to examine the impact of urban growth on surface temperatures. The results revealed a notable and uneven urban growth in the study area. This urban development had raised surface radiant temperature by 13.01 K in the urbanized area. The integration of remote sensing and GIS was found to be effective in monitoring and analysing urban growth patterns, and in evaluating urbanization impact on surface temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The estuarine area of Pearl River that has taken great changes in land cover since 1990 is a typical area for studying the change of land surface temperature (LST). The LST of the years 1990 and 2000 in this area was estimated from the data of Landsat TM/ETM+ band 6, respectively, and three scales, corresponding to high, normal and low temperature ranges, were divided by a robust statistical method. The results show that the area of high temperature range in 2000 has an increase of 250 km2 compared with the year 1990. The urban-used land and the bare land are the main land cover types constituting the high temperature range area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]