The urban heat island (UHI) effect might cause extreme weather, which would seriously affect people’s health, increase energy consumption and cause other negative impacts. To construct urban green spaces is a feasible strategy to effectively weaken the UHI effect. In this study, the cooling effect of green spaces on the UHI effect was carefully investigated in summer and winter in Harbin city. Specifically, the vegetation index and surface temperature information were extracted by the grid method, and based on this data, the relationship between the urban green space and the UHI effect was analyzed quantitatively. In summer, the cooling effect is more significant. The average cooling extent reached 1.65 °C, the average maximum temperature change was 7.5 °C, and the cooling range was mainly 120 m. The cooling effect can be improved by adjusting the green space area, perimeter and shape. Increasing the green area (within 37 ha) or the green circumference (within 5300 m) can most economically improve its cooling effect. The shape factor would significantly affect the cooling effect within 0.03. The simpler the green space shape, the more obvious the cooling effect. In contrast, in winter the green spaces had a certain cooling effect when there was no snow cover or little snow cover, although this was still less significant compared with the situation in summer. The average cooling extent reached 0.48 °C, the average maximum temperature change was 4.25 °C, and the cooling range was mainly 90 m. However, there is no correlation between urban green space and the UHI effect in areas mainly covered by ice and snow. This work could provide protocols for urban green space design to effectively control the UHI effect of sub-frigid cities.

It is important to alleviate the “heat island effect” in urban areas, especially tropical cities. Microclimate is normally affected by the urban morphology parameters. The objective of this work is to investigate the correlation between air temperature variations and urban morphology parameters in tropical cities. Field measurement was carried out to record the air temperature at 27 points within an 8 km² urban area continuously in Singapore for one year. Geographical information system was applied to extract the urban morphology parameters. Generally, the maximum and minimum air temperature spatial differences in the study area ranged from 3.2 to 6.5 °C, indicating the significant effects of urban morphology on the air temperatures. Based on the fitting results of created multilinear regression models, parametric study has been performed to investigate the specific effects of urban morphology parameters on air temperatures. This work has proposed a much more precise regression model to predict the air temperature with various urban morphology parameters. In addition, meaningful value of reference has been offered for urban planners and landscape designers to effectively control the air temperature in tropical cities such as Singapore.