Abstract
Urban development and population have augmented the increase of impervious land-cover. This phenomenon has amplified the effects of climate change and increasing urban island effects due to increases in urban temperatures. Seoul, South Korea is one of the largest metropolitan cities in the world. While land uses in Seoul vary, land cover patterns have not changed much (under 2%) in the past 10 years, making the city a prime target for studying the effects of land cover types on the urban temperature. This research seeks to generalize the urban temperature of Seoul through a series of statistical tests using multi-temporal remote sensing data focusing on multiple scales and typologies of green space to determine its overall effectiveness in reducing the urban heat. The distribution of LST values was reduced as the size of urban forests increased. It means that changing temperature of large-scale green-spaces is less influenced because the broad distribution could be resulted in various external variables such as slope aspect, topographic height and density of planting areas, while small-scale urban forests are more affected from that. The large-scale green spaces contributed significantly to lowering urban temperature by showing a similar mean LST value. Both of concentration and dispersal of urban forests affected the reduction of urban temperature. Therefore, the findings of this research support that creating urban forests in an urban region could reduce urban temperature regardless of the scale.
