Self‐Rated Health in Health Surveys

Micro-scale urban surface temperatures are related to land-cover features and residential heat related health impacts in Phoenix, AZ USA

“…Although prior work has shown a cooling capacity for vegetation, it is generally believed that this capacity is regulated primarily by the area of vegetation (e.g. Jenerette et al 2011;Li et al 2011). Our findings suggest that, in addition to the area of vegetation, other factors influence the cooling capacity of vegetation, which we quantified as slope of LST-NDVI relationship within a neighborhood.…”

“…Self-rated health questions are widely used in the health sciences and other fields because, over decades of research, they have been found to be strong correlates of clinical conditions (Lee 2015) and have been used in assessments of heat vulnerability (Belanger et al 2015).…”

“…Studies of urban LST have primarily evaluated midday spatial variation at neighborhood or coarser scales, such as the city, zip code, and census tract boundaries. However, extensive scale-dependent variation in LST is expected throughout any given day due to different speeds of warming within the complex spatial structure of urban environments (Li et al 2011;Weng et al 2011). Furthermore, the human consequences of urban LST warming are not well characterized at very fine spatial resolutions, such as individual residential parcels, although several studies have found LST variation affects spatial variability in the risk of heatrelated mortality at neighborhood scales (Johnson et al 2009;Buscail et al 2012;Hondula et al 2012;Johnson et al 2012;Harlan et al 2013).…”

“…LST spatial variation is influenced by material properties such as heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and thermal inertia (Elachi 1987), and several studies have proposed that local land cover composition is a primary determinant of LST patterns (Li et al 2011;Connors et al 2013;Zhou et al 2014). Increasing vegetated land cover has been repeatedly shown to lower LST through radiation interception and shading and increases in latent heat fluxes associated with transpiration (Jenerette et al 2007;Kalma et al 2008;Kustas and Anderson 2009;Jenerette et al 2011;Xiang et al 2014;Zhou et al 2014).…”

“…(60 m pixels) or ASTER (90 m pixels) instruments (e.g. Li et al 2011;Myint et al 2013;Song et al 2014). At these resolutions, extensive mixing of land covers may obscure stronger or different relationships at finer resolutions where more urban land cover variability occurs (Zhou et al 2011).…”