Monitoring Urban Heat Island Intensity with Ground-based GNSS Observations and Space-based Radio Occultation and Radiosonde Historical Data

Abstract. Since Urban Heat Islands (UHI) not only negatively impact human health but consume more energy when cooling buildings, accurate monitoring of its impact is critical. In this study, we propose a ground based GNSS technique to fuse GNSS Radio Occultation (RO) and radiosonde products to monitor the UHI intensity, which described as follows: First, the first and second grid tops are defined using the historical RO and radiosonde products. Then, the wet refractivity between the first and second grid tops is fitted to the higher-order spherical harmonic function based on the RO and radiosonde products, and they are used as the inputs of GNSS tomography, which can reduce the number of unknowns voxels of tomography while increasing the effective number of satellite rays, and improving the accuracy of tomography results. Next, according to the relationships among wet refractivity, temperature, and water vapor partial, as well as the function relationships among temperature, wet pressure, and height in adjacent vertical layers, the temperature and water vapor partial pressure can be obtained using the best search method according to the tomography-derived wet refractivity. Finally, the UHI intensity is monitored by the temperature difference between the urban regions and the surrounding rural regions. The radio occultation and radiosonde products of the Hong Kong region from 2010 to 2019, and the observed GNSS network data of the Hong Kong region for the year of 2020 are employed to evaluate the UHI intensity algorithm. The validation of the algorithm is done by comparing the UHI intensity estimated from the algorithm with the temperature data obtained from weather stations. The result shows that the proposed algorithm can achieve an accuracy of 1.2 K at a 95 % confidence level.