Assessment of land surface temperature variation over Rusafa side of Baghdad city, Iraq

Abstract

The current study is concerned with Rusafa side of Baghdad city, which extends on 362 square kilometres and is inhabited by 3738371 people. It suffers from population growth, which led to decline in municipal services and rising of land surface temperature (LST) during the summer season. The current study aims to assess the spatial and temporal variation of LST using different dated satellite images of Landsat 4, 7 and 8 at path 168 and raw 037 during July 16, 1989, April 25, 2000, April 26, 2006, and May 31, 2016. Eight analysis models which were built using ERDAS 2014 software are used to calculate the LST parameters; while the land use/land cover (LULC) types are classified using ENVI v.5.3 software. The maximum surface temperature recorded at barren lands are between 26 and 41°C, while at vegetation cover ranging from 25 to 34°C and an inverse correlation are recorded between LST and NDVI ranging from -0.5 to -0.81. The built-up area was increased by 23%, whereas open spaces and vegetation cover are decreased by 16% and 6% respectively all that consequently will make the environment of the study area prone to be warmer.