Modeling the impact of pandemic on the urban thermal environment over megacities in China: Spatiotemporal analysis from the perspective of heat anomaly variations

• Multi-perspective impacts of pandemic on urban thermal environment were estimated. • Pandemic caused impacts on short-term thermal environment instead of long-term. • The degree of pandemic influences thermal environmental change within cities. • Different land use types experience different patterns of heat anomaly transfer. • Biophysical parameters mainly influence heat anomaly changes. Influenced by lockdown policies and anomalies in human activities, emergencies such as pandemic significantly altered the urban thermal environment. However, the spatiotemporal heat anomaly changes across and within cities during emergencies and their drivers have not been fully investigated. This study quantified the changes in the urban thermal environment in China before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on z-scores and multiscale geographically weighted regression models, heat anomaly changes and transfer patterns of different land uses in cities with varying degrees of pandemic impact and drivers were estimated. During the entire year, we found that although the pandemic significantly reduced surface urban heat island intensity during 5 % to 35 % of days, it did not change significantly throughout 2020. During the first-level public health emergency response, the land surface temperatures of residential and commercial lands notably affected by the pandemic decreased by −0.195°C and −0.371°C, and the shifting of strong heat anomaly zones in industrial lands increased heat anomaly and no heat anomaly zones by 6.1 % and 1.4 %, respectively. Furthermore, thermal anomalies were highly correlated with changes in biophysical parameters during the pandemic. These findings provide insights and mitigation strategies for the fluctuations in the urban thermal environment caused by emergencies.