Fine-grained Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting: A Context-aware Thermodynamic Modeling Framework

Climate change and rapid urbanization have led to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, resulting in higher temperatures in metropolitan areas and negatively impacting urban communities. Accurate UHI forecasting is crucial for identifying high-risk periods and locations, especially in cities with vulnerable populations. Current methods are limited by data granularity and inadequate modeling of regional thermodynamics, which affects both accuracy and spatio-temporal granularity. In this paper, we propose DeepUHI, a data-driven context-aware framework for modeling local thermodynamics based on the heat equation, alongside the SeoulTemp dataset, the first multi-modal dataset for UHI effect predictions at the street level. Our framework utilizes a heat decomposition method to represent urban thermodynamics through thermodynamic cycles and thermal flows, effectively integrating urban environmental data. Extensive experiments show that our framework improves accuracy in UHI effect prediction and warning tasks, outperforming leading models. We have integrated DeepUHI into our SeoUHI platform to provide hourly street-level UHI forecasting for Seoul. The code, platform, and dataset are accessible at https://github.com/CityMind-Lab/DeepUHI.