Urban Land Use Land Cover Changes and Their Effect on Land Surface Temperature: Case Study Using Dohuk City in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Gaylan Faqe Ibrahim

doi:10.3390/cli5010013

Abstract

The growth of urban areas has a significant impact on land use by replacing areas of vegetation with residential and commercial areas and their related infrastructure; this escalates the land surface temperature (LST). Rapid urban growth has occurred in Duhok City due to enhanced political and economic growth during the period of this study. The objective is to investigate the effect of land use changes on LST; this study depends on data from three Landsat images (two Landsat 5-TM and Landsat OLI_TIRS-8) from 1990, 2000 and 2016. Supervised classification was used to compute land use/cover categories, and to generate the land surface temperature (LST) maps the Mono-window algorithm was used. Images were also used to create the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), normalized difference bareness index (NDBAI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI) maps. Linear regression analysis was used to generate relationships between LST with NDVI, NDBI, NDBAI and NDWI. The study outcome proves that the changes in land use/cover have a significant role in the escalation of land surface temperatures. The highest temperatures are associated with barren land and built-up areas, ranging from 47°C, 50°C, 56°C while lower temperatures are related to water bodies and forests, ranging from 25°C, 26°C, 29°C respectively, in 1990, 2000 and 2016. This study also proves that NDVI and NDWI correlate negatively with low temperatures while NDBI and NDBAI correlate positively with high temperatures.

Highlights

In the last decade, climate researchers’ attention was increasingly drawn to local and regional climate under anthropogenic influences to better understand the increasing change in the climate’s driving factors [1]
This study proves that normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI) correlate negatively with low temperatures while normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) and normalized difference bareness index (NDBAI) correlate positively with high temperatures
The outcome of the land cover classification showed that the built-up areas and water bodies increased by 12.02% and 0.1%, respectively, while the barren land and vegetation decreased by 1.63% and 1.46%, respectively, during the study period, due to political and socio-economic factors

Summary

Introduction

Climate researchers’ attention was increasingly drawn to local and regional climate under anthropogenic influences to better understand the increasing change in the climate’s driving factors [1]. One of the main causes of global climate change is increasing industrialization and urbanization. The most crucial problem that urban areas suffer from is rising surface temperatures caused by the loss of areas of vegetation and the increase of impermeable non-transpiring, non-evaporating, hard land surfaces [2,3,4,5,6]. One of the most noticeable effects of the modifications of terrestrial ecosystems by human activity is the change in land use/land cover (LULC) as it has greatly impacted the environment locally, regionally and globally [7,8,9]. The amount of humidity in the air is greatly affected by the change of natural land surfaces to built-up areas as vegetation is a major source of humidity [10]. Higher thermal capability for releasing daytime heat at night and greater solar radiation absorption are usually caused in urban areas by replacing vegetative areas with paved

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion