Quantification of LST and CO2 levels using Landsat-8 thermal bands on urban environment

Abstract

Land surface temperature (LST) is an important aspect in global to regional change studies, for control of climate change and balancing of high temperature. Urbanization is one of the influencing factors increasing land surface and atmospheric temperature, by the emission of greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2, NO and methane). In the present study, LST was derived from Landsat-8 of multitemporal data sets to analyse the spatial structure of the urban thermal environment in relation to the urban surface characteristics and land use–land cover (LULC). LST is influenced by the greenhouse gases i.e. CO2 plays an important role in increasing the earth’s surface temperature. In order to provide the evidence of influence of CO2 on LST, the relationship between LST, air temperature and CO2 was analysed. Landsat-8 satellite has two thermal bands, 10 and 11. These bands were used to accurately to calculate the temperature over the study area. Results showed that the strength of correlation between ground monitoring data and satellite data was high. Based on correlation values of each month April (R2 = 0.994), May (R2 = 0.297) and June (R2 = 0.934), observed results show that band 10 was significantly correlating with air temperature. Relationship between LST and CO2 levels were obtained from linear regression analysis. band 11 was correlating significantly with CO2 values in each of the months April (R2 = 0.217), May (R2 = 0.914) and June, (R2 = 0.934), because band 11 is closer to the 15-micron band of CO2. From the results, it was observed that band 10 can be used for calculating air temperature and band 11 can be used for estimation of greenhouse gases.