Dear Koleen,

Please have a look at this useful link and PDF attachment.

Good luck

Will do. Thank you so much Arvind!

Here is that extremely useful link which I forgot to paste in my previous post. Also check the PDF attachments.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_methods_would_be_well-suited_to_measuring_the_Urban_Heat_Island_effect/1

Thank you very much Arvind! I'll definitely take a look at those

basically, there are two ways to measure the urban heat island (UHI). the first one is from the weather station (Air temperature). the second one is from the remote sensing data. due to the limitation of the weather station data, more and more study use RS data (Land surface temperature) to value the UHI effect. Also, there are some allethrins to value the UHI intensity. You can check the google scholar, there is a lot of related papers. 

Hope it can help you! 

Dear Koleen:

Unfortunately is in Spanish, But in the website of our project Urban-CLIMPLAN, The urban heat island: effects on climate change and modelling towards strategies of territorial and urban planning. Application to the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona (http://www-cpsv.upc.es/Urban-CLIMPLAN), specifically in the section 2. Background and current status, you will find description of method, differences, evolution, etc.

In addition in the extended Bibliography website (http://www-cpsv.upc.es/Urban-CLIMPLAN/Biblio.htm) you’ll find references of authors and methods used.

I hope help you.

Best regards.

Thank you for the ideas, Zhaowu and Rolando! They're really helpful :)