Remote Sensing-Based Approach to Identify the Influence of Land Use/Land Cover Change on the Urban Thermal Environment

Urbanization leads to massive land use/land cover (LULC) change and contributes significantly to increases in urban land surface temperature (LST). The rapid, unplanned transformation of urban LULC significantly affects the functions of the associated ecosystem and biodiversity. This study aims to identify the variation in LULC, and its influences on the urban thermal environment, such as LST, urban heat island (UHI), and urban field variance index (UTFVI), for Chattogram city, Bangladesh. Multi-temporal Landsat Thematic Mapper/OLI: Operational Land Imager (TM/OLI) satellite images were used for the years 1999, 2009, and 2019, to classify LULC classes, identify the transition between different LULCs and to quantify variation in LST, UHI and UFVI distribution in the study area. Using the support vector machine algorithm,…