Abstract
This paper analyzes the effects of urban density, vegetation cover, and water body on thermal islands measured by land surface temperature in Al Anbar province, Iraq using multi-temporal Landsat images. Images from Landsat 7 ETM and Landsat 8 OLI for the years 2000, 2014, and 2018 were collected, pre-processed, and anal yzed. The results suggested that the strongest correlation was found between the Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) and the surface temperature. The correlation between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the surface temperature was slightly weaker compared to that of NDBI. However, the weakest correlation was found between the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the temperature. The results obtained in this research may help the decision makers to take actions to reduce the effects of thermal islands by looking at the details in the produced maps and the analyzed values of these spectral indices.
Highlights
Remote sensing provides satellite or aerial imagery that can be used to generate many forms of spatial information such as urban areas, land use types, vegetated areas, water bodies and other information about utilities and infrastructures in a region (He, Gao, Huang, Ma, & Dou, 2017)
All indices applied in this study, including NDVI, NDBI, and NDWI, were extracted from the Landsat 7 ETM and Landsat-8 OLI images
To gain more insights about the effects of urban density, vegetation cover, and water extents on land surface temperature (LST) in the study area, this research explored the correlation between these variables and the dependent LST variable
Summary
Remote sensing provides satellite or aerial imagery that can be used to generate many forms of spatial information such as urban areas, land use types, vegetated areas, water bodies and other information about utilities and infrastructures in a region (He, Gao, Huang, Ma, & Dou, 2017). GIS provides efficient and useful solutions for creating, storing, analyzing and visualizing those data acquired using remote sensing. The advancement of these technologies has improved the research of analyzing the impacts of thermal islands on urbanization, vegetation cover, and water bodies. Remote sensing developed in the last decades providing sensors capturing satellite images of land, which represent with a high scale of resolution of the objects on the surface of the Earth. This representation is of great importance to planners and land managers, where a wide range of imaging scales are operating. The specific objectives are (1) calculating three spectral indices that represent urban density (NDBI, Normalized Difference Building Index), vegetation cover (NDVI, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), and water bodies (NDWI, Normalized Difference Water Index), (2) calculating the land surface temperature (LST), and (3) analyzing the correlation between the spectral indices and the LST over different grids in the area of interest
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