Impacts of Urban Land Use Land Cover Pattern on Land Surface Temperature

Abstract

The impact of rising temperature due to climate change and its potential implications on human life in the past decade has become an issue of utmost significance. Rapid unplanned urbanization and its impact on land use change can be visualized spatially as well as temporally using remote sensing data combined with GIS. The present study computes the change in land surface temperature (LST) with the change in land use class. Landsat data for four different time periods from 1991 to 2017 was acquired to compute land use and LST using supervised learning and mono-window algorithm, respectively. Land use spatial patterns revealed that built-up increased from 1.85% in 1990 to 21.49% in 2017, and the vegetation reduced to half in this time period. LST was computed using modified emissivity method pointed out a rise in minimum temperature in the city, especially in the regions of recent development. Changes in peri-urban buffer zones and urban zones show a stark difference in temperature due to regions converted to open areas. The study points out that if the urban growth is allowed as usual, it would contribute largely in increased urban heat islands.