Despite research on urban heat island (UHI) effect has increased exponentially over the last few decades, a systematic review of factors contributing to UHI effect has scarcely been reported in the literature. This paper provides a systematic and overarching review of different spatial and temporal factors affecting the UHI effect. UHI is a phenomenon when urban areas experience a higher temperature than their surrounding non-urban areas and is considered as a critical factor contributing to global warming, heat related mortalities, and unpredictable climatic changes. Therefore, there is a pressing need to identify the spatio-temporal factors that contribute to (or mitigate) the UHI effect in order to develop a thorough understanding of their causal mechanism so that these are addressed through urban planning policies. This paper systematically identified 75 eligible studies on UHI effect and reviews the nature and type of satellite images used, the techniques applied to classify land cover/use changes, the models to assess the link between spatio-temporal factors and UHI effect, and the effects of these factors on UHI. The review results show that: a) 54% of the studies used Landsat TM images for modelling the UHI effect followed by Landsat ETM (34%), and MODIS (28%); b) land cover indices (46%), followed by supervised classification (17%) were the dominant methods to derive land cover/use changes associated with UHI effect; c) ordinary least square regression is the most commonly applied method (68%) to investigate the link between different spatio-temporal factors and the UHI effect followed by comparative analysis (33%); and d) the most common factors affecting the UHI effect as reported in the reviewed studies, include vegetation cover (44%), season (33%), built-up area (28%), day/night (25%), population density (14%), water body (12%) together with others. This research discusses the findings in policy terms and provides directions for future research.

尽管在过去的几十年中，对城市热岛效应的研究呈指数级增长，但文献中几乎没有报道过对导致UHI效应的因素进行系统的综述。本文提供了影响UHI效应的不同时空因素的系统综述。当城市地区的温度高于其周围非城市地区的温度时，UHI是一种现象，被认为是导致全球变暖，与热有关的死亡率和不可预测的气候变化的关键因素。因此，迫切需要确定造成（或减轻）UHI效应的时空因素，以便对它们的因果机制有一个透彻的了解，以便通过城市规划政策来解决这些因果关系。本文系统地确定了75项有关UHI效应的合格研究，并回顾了所用卫星图像的性质和类型，用于对土地覆盖/利用变化进行分类的技术，评估时空因素与UHI效应之间的联系的模型以及这些效应这些因素对UHI的影响。审查结果表明：a）54％的研究使用Landsat TM图像模拟UHI效应，其次是Landsat ETM（34％）和MODIS（28％）；b）土地覆盖指数（46％），其次是监督分类（17％），是得出与UHI效应相关的土地覆盖/利用变化的主要方法；c）普通最小二乘回归是最常用的方法（68％），用于研究不同时空因素与UHI效应之间的联系，然后进行比较分析（33％）；d）综述研究中报告的影响UHI效应的最常见因素包括植被覆盖率（44％），季节（33％），建筑面积（​​28％），昼/夜（25％），人口密度（14％），水体（12％）以及其他。这项研究从政策角度讨论了研究结果，并为将来的研究提供了指导。