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Quantification of urban heat intensity with land use/land cover changes using Landsat satellite data over urban landscapes

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Abstract

Urban heat island (UHI) is a phenomenon which may have adverse effects on our environment and is stimulated as a result of urbanization or land cover changes. Thermal remote sensing has been found beneficial to study the effect of urbanization on UHI intensity. This paper analyses the variation in land surface temperature (LST) with land cover changes in Varanasi city of India from 1989 to 2018 using Landsat satellite images. A new index named Urban Heat Intensity Ratio Index (UHIRI) was proposed to quantify the urban heat intensity from 1989 to 2018 which was found to increase from 0.36 in year 1989 to 0.87 in year 2018. Further, contribution of each land cover towards UHI was determined using land cover contribution index (LCCI). The negative value of LCCI for water and vegetation indicates its negative contribution towards UHI, whereas positive value of LCCI for bare soil and built-ups depicted its positive contribution towards UHI. The LCCI value for urban land cover shows significant increase in 29 years, i.e. 0.49, 1.43, 3.40 and 4.37 for years 1989, 1997, 2008 and 2018, respectively. The changes in normalized LST from years 1989 to 2018 for the conversion of bare land to built-ups and vegetation to built-ups were found to be as −0.11 and 0.42, respectively. This led to conclusion that the replacement of vegetation with urban land cover has severe impact on increasing UHI intensity.

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Availability of data and material

The Landsat satellite data was used for the study and downloaded from the website of Earth Explorer that was freely available for users.

Code availability

Software: Envi 5.1, Matlab, QGIS.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India, for providing a research platform and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi, India, for providing the financial support. The authors also wish to thank the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for making the satellite data available for study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India

    Ruchi Bala, Rajendra Prasad & Vijay Pratap Yadav

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  1. Ruchi Bala
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  2. Rajendra Prasad
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  3. Vijay Pratap Yadav
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Contributions

Ruchi Bala: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software handling, validation, writing of original draft, writing of review and editing. Rajendra Prasad: resources, supervision, writing of review and editing. Vijay Pratap Yadav: data curation, investigation, software handling, writing of review and editing.

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Correspondence to Rajendra Prasad.

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Bala, R., Prasad, R. & Yadav, V.P. Quantification of urban heat intensity with land use/land cover changes using Landsat satellite data over urban landscapes. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 1–12 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03610-3

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