Abstract
Heat island is known as the increases in air temperature through large and industrial cities compared to surrounding rural areas. In this study, remote sensing technology is used to monitor and track thermal variations within the city center of Baghdad through Landsat satellite images and for the period from 2000 to 2015. Several processors and treatments were applied on these images using GIS 10.6 and ERDAS 2014, such as image correction and extraction, supervised classification, and selection of training samples. Urban areas detection was resulted from the supervised classification linked to the temperature readings of the surface taken from the thermal bands of satellite images. The results showed that the surface temperature of the city of Baghdad increased by 8 degrees Celsius in 15 years. This is due to the increase in the expansion of the urban areas type of land use, where the human activity, especially after 2003, caused increased buildup area to about 198.41 km2. All these changes occurred at the expense of many green regions which were reduced, with the transformation of open and agricultural areas to residential, commercial, and industrial uses. Increases in surface temperature resulted increases in air temperature, where the minimum temperature showed larger increases relative to maximum temperature (about 1.44 and 0.76 ºC, respectively).
Highlights
Urbanization is an extreme example of human land use modification, since it radically alters the physical properties of the Earth’s surface and may affect the thermal, radiative, and aerodynamic characteristics of the surface [1]
9 - Conclusions The surface temperature of Baghdad city center has increased by 2.5 oC in 15 years
This is due to the increase in the area of land use caused by urban expansion, where the built-up areas, or those that entered the class of human activity, especially after 2003, increased by about 45.2 km2
Summary
Observations of the average air temperature over the surface of Baghdad city were obtained from the station of the Iraqi Meteorological and Seismology organization, located near the international Baghdad airport. Barren land and asphalt concrete share similar spectral properties To overcome this spectral confusion, numerous techniques have been developed for the built-up and urban land cover mapping using satellite data [17]. The first step to calculate the Earth's surface temperature is to convert the digital numbers of the satellite image to spectral radiation values [19]. This is achieved by two methods, one of which is based on the lower and higher spectral radiation values (radiance minimum and maximum) that is extracted from the Metadata file type and the sensor of the satellite.
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