There is a
new paper with the title: "The urban heat island effect and city contiguity". The authors, Neil Debbage and J. Marshall Shepherd from the University of Georgia analysed the difference between urban areas in the USA and their rural surrounds. I don't have time to go into much detail except to say that, as
with other studies, they found that some places have an Urban Cool Island Effect. Not all cities are hotter than their surrounds.
Here's the map from Figure 4 in
the paper:
 |
| Fig. 4. Map of the annual average UHI intensity (°C) in 2010 for the 50 most populous MSAs in the United States. |