Satellite-based Analysis of the Role of Land Use/Land Cover and Vegetation Density on Surface Temperature Regime of Delhi, India

The knowledge of the surface temperature is important to a range of issues and themes in earth sciences central to urban climatology, global environmental change, and humanenvironment interactions. The study over Delhi, India has been undertaken to analyze the potential of ASTER data in retrieving biophysical parameters for estimating land surface temperature and for exploring the possibility to ascertain the influence of land use/ land cover and vegetation density (NDVI) on surface temperatures/ temperature amplitudes. It was found that the classification with MNF components gives better accuracy than classification with original bands as MNF transformation reduces data redundancy and correlations between spectral bands. The satellite derived emissivity values were found to be in good agreement with literature and field measured values. It is observed that fallow land, waste land/bare soil, commercial/industrial and high dense built-up area exhibits a higher surface temperatures during day time, while water bodies, agricultural cropland, and dense vegetation have lower surface temperatures. During the night time higher surface temperatures are found over high dense built-up, water bodies, commercial/industrial and low dense built-up while fallow land, dense vegetation, and agricultural cropland have lower surface temperatures. It was found that there is a strong negative correlation between surface temperature and NDVI over dense vegetation, sparse vegetation and low dense built-up area while with fraction vegetation cover, it indicates a moderate negative correlation. It indicates that surface temperature over land use /land cover types is greatly influenced by the amount of vegetation present. The result suggests that the methodology is feasible to estimate NDVI, surface emissivity and surface temperature with reasonable accuracy over heterogeneous urban area. The analysis also indicates that the relationship between the spatial distribution of land use/land cover and vegetation density is closely related to the development of urban heat islands (UHI).JRC.G.3-Monitoring agricultural resource