Analysis and prediction of land surface temperature with increasing urbanisation using satellite imagery

The unplanned growth of urbanization in towns and cities has led to variations in Land Surface Temperature (LST) as the green lands are converted into impervious structures without land cover management. In this study, an effort is made to study the transformational change in natural land cover area over the years and its impact on LST in Ernakulum District of Kerala, India. As per the current statistics from one of the reports on "Observed Rainfall Variability and Changes Over Kerala State", by Indian Metrological Department in January 2020 shows that there is a significant decreasing trend in rainy days in many districts of Kerala which has resulted in highest temperature records in recent years. To understand the change in temperature trends in the district, Landsat data is collected for four different years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 that maps Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) pattern for vegetation cover and built-up areas. It is important to interpret LULC maps as converting the vegetative land in built-up areas leads to multiple reflecting surfaces and temperature trapping which serves as the most direct way to understand the influence of global warming. The major merit of this research is (i) to interpret the temporal changes in LULC for categorizing the images in different land covers, (ii) to analyze Urban Thermal Field Variance Index (UTFVI) to quantify the urban heat island (UHI) effect in the region, (iii) to assess change in temperature by analyzing the spatio-temporal variations in mean temperatures for different land cover classes, and (iv) to analyze the trend of LST wrt to vegetation spectral index i.e., Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) and spectral building index i.e., Normalized Difference Building Index (NDBI) to predict the percentage change in temperature in successive years using the widely used regression model. The computational simulation findings show that the percentage area of vegetated land decreases from 47.91 % to 29.04 % and the LST change analysis observed for years from 2005 to 2020 is 2.55 °C. For built up land, the percentage area is increased from 6.50 % to 15.27 % and the change in LST observed from year 2005-2020 is 4.82 °C which is a significant rise in temperature. The overall accuracy achieved for four respective years comes out to be 93, 89, 90, and 92 %. It has been observed from the analysis, that there is a change in temperature over the period of time from 2005 to 2020 b 3.45 °C. This is due to unplanned use of land cover classes that show considerable change in LULC maps that can be seen in the simulated results for a given study area. If the rate of change in area appeared to constantly change in this manner, then there is a possibility of further increase in land surface temperature and that will contribute in increase of temperature. The rise in mean LST from year 2020-2025 would be 0.5 °C and 1.0 °C for year 2030.