Evolution of urban areas and land surface temperature
This research addresses urban planning and climate change impacts by identifying spatio-temporal patterns of temperature changes due to city expansion, though it is incremental in nature.
The study analyzed the relationship between urban expansion and land surface temperature (LST) changes over time, finding that urban growth increases areas with higher LST and causes shifts in the LST center of mass, with observations made across three cities on different continents.
With the global population on the rise, our cities have been expanding to accommodate the growing number of people. The expansion of cities generally leads to the engulfment of peripheral areas. However, such expansion of urban areas is likely to cause increment in areas with increased land surface temperature (LST). By considering each summer as a data point, we form LST multi-year time-series and cluster it to obtain spatio-temporal pattern. We observe several interesting phenomena from these patterns, e.g., some clusters show reasonable similarity to the built-up area, whereas the locations with high temporal variation are seen more in the peripheral areas. Furthermore, the LST center of mass shifts over the years for cities with development activities tilted towards a direction. We conduct the above-mentioned studies for three different cities in three different continents.