Combinative Study of Urban Heat Island in Ascoli Piceno City with Remote Sensing and CFD Simulation—Climate Change and Urban Health Resilience—CCUHRE Project

Mapping the Shifting Focus in Remote Sensing Literature: Technology, Methodology, and Applications

This paper characterizes the body of knowledge on remote sensing from 1999 to 2021 by employing bibliometric techniques based on the Science Citation Index databases and the Social Science Citation Index of the Web of Science, abbreviated to “SCI” and “SSCI”, respectively. A total of 28,438 articles were analyzed from various aspects of the publication characteristics, such as countries, institutes, subjects, journals, and keywords. Dynamic changes in published remote sensing research were examined by segregating the 19-year period into 4 stages. Co-occurrences of keywords from three aspects were evaluated, including technology, methodology, and applications. Results show that “hyperspectral remote sensing”, “classification”, “monitoring” and “MODIS” in the category of technology have emerged more frequently in recent years, and there are strong co-occurrences of “remote sensing” and “GIS” in the remote sensing technology category. In addition, there was a marked shift from traditional analytical methods (i.e., geostatistics and neural networks) to a variety of emerging methods, such as support vector machines, random forests, and feature extraction. Moreover, research hotspots are identified for remote sensing applications, which have expanded significantly with improvements in technology and methodology. In particular, “water quality”, “climate change”, and “urbanization” have become popular themes in recent years. Finally, future directions of remote sensing are identified, which would be beneficial for researchers and policy makers.

A Study of Simulation of the Urban Space 3D Temperature Field at a Community Scale Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing and CFD

This study used high-resolution remote-sensing technology and CFD models to carry out a simulation study of a three-dimensional (3D) USTE for daytime and nighttime at a block scale. Firstly, the influence of vegetation with different spatial layouts on the 3D USTE was analyzed. Moreover, the heat transfer process and heat conduction process between urban surface components at the block scale were simulated, and in the meanwhile, the distribution and changes of the 3D USTE and the regional wind pressure environment were monitored. The simulation results showed that (1) vegetation has a relatively significant mitigation effect on the thermal environment near the surface, (2) vegetation with different morphologies and layouts results in significant differences in the mitigation efficiency of wind speed and canyon USTE, and (3) the seasonal spatial 3D temperature can be mitigated as well. In addition, this study analyzed the mitigation effect of vegetation on the urban wind–heat environment during both daytime and nighttime. The results indicated that (1) the mitigation effect of vegetation is more significant during the daytime, while showing a small value at night with an even temperature distribution, and (2) convection heat transfer is the primary cause, or one of the major causes, of differences in the USTE.