Abstract

This paper presents the formation of urban heat island under the impact of urbanization in Hochiminh City in 1989-2006. Urbanization with increasing impervious surfaces impacted the common temperature background over the city by the warm rising trend. The results of applying remote sensing method extracting urban surface temperature defined the magnitude and space extension of “Surface urban heat island”, where the differences of surface temperature between urban and rural areas on 2006 image were about 11oC – 12oC. The magnitude of surface urban heat island increased in 6 to 26 times, particularly the biggest heat island was concentrated in the inner city with the area about 29.000ha. Urban heat island greatly influences the environment and the human health. Therefore, it is necessary to act on reducing the temperature of heat island in order to make our city more friendly to environment, to ensure human health, to decrease the energy demand and waste of water by sustainable development goal.