Assessment of heat islands in the south-east planning region in Bulgaria by remote sensing

Surface and ground air temperatures are one of the variables that best distinguish and characterize the specific climate in urbanized areas. Over the years, studies have shown that urbanized areas have experienced consistently higher temperatures, which is defined as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. The same effect can be observed in non-urbanized areas, such as places with industry, landfills for domestic waste and illegal dumps. This effect was also studied over the waste dump in Bratovo - West, Dolno Ezerovo residential district, Burgas region, South East planning region. The study covers example from the planning region defined in the Law on Regional Development of the Republic of Bulgaria under Art. 11, which will support the Integrated Territorial Development Strategy of NUTS 2 planning area as BG34 Sout-Еast region. These are areas that have extremely high economic and ecological importance for monitoring the normal course of natural processes, disasters and consequences of sudden changes in the area of the entire Black Sea coast, which is heavily populated in summer. Various indicators and indices from the optical and microwave range, such as Tasseled cap transformation (TCT), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Differential Greenness Index (NDGI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), etc., have been used for different areas of interest. Spectral reflectance characteristics of natural and anthropogenic objects have been used to classify temperature. Different methods and models for processing LST data from the Landsat and Copernicus programs were used for the study.