Simulation of future land surface temperature under the scenario of climate change using remote sensing & GIS techniques of northwestern Rajshahi district, Bangladesh

Abstract

Identification of change dynamics of land surface temperature on regional scale is a very convenient way to describe the issues related global warming and climate change. This study aims to assess the spatio-temporal pattern of land surface temperature during 2014–2020 along with future simulation and to investigate the meteorological condition of northwestern Rajshahi district of Bangladesh during last few decades. Surface temperature and land cover indices were derived in this study from the multi-temporal Landsat imagery. Besides, unsupervised classification method was utilized to recognize the land cover classes. The trend in annual and seasonal mean temperature and total rainfall together with the frequency of hot and cold days were computed in this study from daily based meteorological data. The impact of land use and climate change was assessed through regression analysis. Finally, land surface temperature for the years 2022 and 2024 was predicted by utilizing a cellular automata model integrated with the artificial neural network. This study revealed that mean surface temperature of both post-monsoon and winter season has increased during 2014–2020 where its seasonal based variation has gradually declined. Annual mean temperature has increased by +0.0195 °C/year with the increase in seasonal mean temperature of pre-monsoon (0.0162 °C/year), monsoon (0.043 °C/year) and post-monsoon (0.0124 °C/year) during 1985–2018. The frequency of hot days is also increasing (0.4127 days/year) significantly. The maximum rate of rainfall during the monsoon has decreased (9.0098 mm/year) which leaves a chance of future drought conditions to occur at Rajshahi even in the rainy season. Land surface temperature is highly influenced by land cover pattern and it increases with expansion of impervious land cover like settlement. Simulation result considering the changing trend of meteorological elements and land cover reveals that surface temperature greater than 27.5 °C would slightly decrease in 2022 but overall lands with surface temperature 23.5–25.5 °C would increase during the post-monsoon period in 2022 and 2024.