Multifactorial influences on land surface temperature within local climate zones of typical global cities

The land surface temperature (LST) of most cities is rising steadily due to both human activities and global climate change, affecting the thermal comfort of cities and threatening the physical health of their inhabitants. Investigating surface temperature features and their affecting elements is therefore essential to improve the thermal environment of cities. Due to differences in surface temperature characteristics in different climatic belts. However, there is still a lack of research on how the local climate zones (LCZs) of different climate belts are affected by natural and social causes. According to the Koppen-Geiger climate classification system, we selected three representative cities from each of the four macroclimatic belts and adopted multiple linear stepwise regression and boosted regression trees (BRT) to systematically explore the linear relationships, relative impacts and marginal effects of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), population density, and road nuclear density within urban LCZs on LST. The results indicate that (1) LCZs with significant differences in LST among the four global climatic belts account for more than 95 % (P < 0.05), demonstrating that LCZs can effectively differentiate LST based on different land surface cover types. This study can delve into the relationships between the four influencing factors and LST based on LCZs. (2) Primary control factors regulating LST differ in different climate belts. The relative effects of NDVI and MNDWI on LST are greater in the arid and temperate belts, with each 0.1 increase in NDVI and MNDWI producing a cooling effect of more than 0.40 °C and 0.92 °C, respectively. Ventilation corridors created by increased road core density produced a cooling effect of 1 °C or more in the cold belt, with the most pronounced cooling effect. (3) When natural factors are higher and social factors are lower, LST cannot be minimized. It was found that LST was minimized when NDVI, MNDWI, population density and road nuclear density were controlled above 0.4, 0.1–0.2, 10,000–50,000 and 1500–2000 respectively. Our study will provide targeted measures for LCZ-based mitigation of urban thermal environments in various macroclimatic belts.