The rapid urbanization with high intensity is recently occurring in the world,resulting in more urban heat island( UHI) phenomenon. It has a direct or indirect impact on various eco-environment factors of cities,regions and even the whole world. To grasp the influencing factors of urban heat island is the premise to realize its benefit-tending and harm-avoiding.Now the remote sensing method has been widely accepted and used for the UHI monitoring. Aiming at the current issuethat the previous reviews could not reflect the developing status and trends of this study field nowadays,the previous studiesat home and abroad on the influencing factors of surface urban heat island( SUHI) are firstly reviewed from seven aspects,including the land use and land cover ( LULC) types,surface biophysical conditions,landscape pattern,the intensity of humanactivity,meteorological condition and geographical location,policy factors,and synthetical analysis. Then,several key issuesor potential research directions are proposed based on the blank research field in the existing studies,or those are with conflicting conclusions or still needed to be deepen. The main contents are as follows. ( 1) Synchronously study the surface urban heat island issue for various cities with different sizes at multiple climate zones at various times or during multiple time periods. ( 2) Refine the LULC types. ( 3) Introduce more spatial analysis methods. ( 4) Propose or complete indicators about the surface biophysical conditions,landscape composition and configuration,intensity of human activities,meteorological condition,geographic location,etc. ( 5) Extract mass information of the big data by methods of multidisciplinary. ( 6)Synthetically analyse its various affect indicators,and explore the optimal configuration scheme together considering other urbanissues.
