{
  "abstract": "Heat exposure connects the built environment and public health, directly shaping the livability and sustainability of urban areas. Fully understanding the spatial heterogeneity of heat exposure and its driving factors is therefore a vital prerequisite for climate-adaptive urban planning. However, most planning-oriented studies rely on land surface temperature (LST), and whether LST adequately represents human heat exposure and how it differs from physiologically relevant heat stress remains insufficiently examined. Here, adopting Landsat-retrieved 30-m LST and GPU-accelerated 1-m universal thermal climate index (UTCI) in Singapore, this study establishes a comprehensive “Modeling-Comparing-Assessing” framework to systematically evaluate the spatial and mechanistic discrepancies between the two metrics. We further investigate pronounced non-stationary and threshold-based quantitative relationships of the two metrics with urban factors by employing a novel geographically weighted XGBoost (GW-XGBoost) and generalized additive model (GAM) workflow. Our results demonstrate notable discrepancies in spatial patterns of LST and UTCI, along with substantial spatial heterogeneity in how 2D and 3D urban factors impact these two thermal metrics, as revealed by explainable GW-XGBoost models (the test R 2 = 0.855 for LST and 0.905 for UTCI, respectively). Crucially, spatially explicit SHAP interprets that sky view factor plays a central role in explaining UTCI variability but exhibits a comparatively marginal independent contribution to LST, indicating that LST inadequately captures shading-driven and radiative processes governing actual human heat stress. Notably, SHAP-GAM analysis indicates that higher albedo is associated with increased UTCI. These novel findings provide model-informed planning implications for integrating physiologically relevant thermal indices to support targeted heat risk management and climate-adaptive urban planning.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES), CREATE Tower, Singapore 138602, Singapore",
    "Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117566, Singapore",
    "Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA",
    "Urban Analytics Subject Group, Urban Studies & Social Policy Division, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom",
    "Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, Ministry of Education, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China",
    "Design Group, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 7,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Yuan Wang",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1442-2952"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Shengao Yi",
      "orcid": "0009-0008-2377-155X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Xiaojiang Li",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4208-1641"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        3
      ],
      "name": "Pengyuan Liu",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5443-5910"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        4
      ],
      "name": "Zhiwei Yang"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5
      ],
      "name": "Ronita Bardhan",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5336-4084"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Rudi Maria Frans Anne Stouffs",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4200-5833"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6ff8d47ewk017.bib",
  "cited_by": 8,
  "doi": "10.1016/j.scs.2026.107659",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "6ff8d47ewk017",
  "issns": [
    "2210-6707",
    "2210-6715"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2026.107659",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY-NC",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-NC",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "openalex",
      "2305|Urban Heat Island Mitigation"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7168178972",
  "pdf_url": null,
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-07-13",
  "publisher": "Elsevier BV",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6ff8d47ewk017.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T13:26:58Z",
      "native_id": "W7168178972",
      "source": "openalex",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2026.107659"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "openalex:2305|Urban Heat Island Mitigation",
      "subfield": "environmental-science"
    }
  ],
  "title": "From physical surfaces to human-centric heat stress: LST and UTCI heat mapping reveals nonlinear effects of urban morphology",
  "title_text": "From physical surfaces to human-centric heat stress: LST and UTCI heat mapping reveals nonlinear effects of urban morphology",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-04T13:21:17Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6ff8d47ewk017",
  "venue": "Sustainable Cities and Society",
  "versions": []
}