Evolution of urban areas and land surface temperature
Sudipan Saha Tushar Verma Dario Augusto Borges Oliveira
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.