Urban heat evolution in a tropical area utilizing Landsat imagery

Abstract

Cloud cover is the main limitation of using remote sensing to study Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change, and Land Surface Temperature (LST) in tropical area like Malaysia. In order to study LULC change and its effect on LST, the Landsat images were utilized within Geographical Information System (GIS) with the aim of removing the effect of cloud cover and image's gaps on the Digital Number (DN) of the pixels. 5356 points according to pixels coordinate which represent the 960. m to 960. m area were created in GIS environment and matched with thermal bands of the study area in remote sensing environment. The DNs of these points were processed to extract LST and imported in GIS environment to derive the temperature maps. Temperature was found to be generally higher in 2010 than in 2000. The comparison of the highest temperature area in the temperature maps with ground stations data showed that the topographical characteristics of the area, and the wind speed, and direction influence the occurrence of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This study concludes that integration of remote sensing data and GIS is a useful tool in urban LST detection in tropical area.