The influence of land-use/land-cover changes on land surface temperature: a case study of Kuala Lumpur metropolitan city

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes on land surface temperature (LST) in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan city using multi-spectral and multi-temporal satellite data. The spectral radiance model was used to extract the LST from Landsat 8 OLI and Landsat 5 TM. The analysis on LULC changes revealed a phenomenal increase in the urban (high built-up area) areas and a decrease in the forest land area. The distribution of average changes in LST shows that urban (high built-up area) areas recorded the highest increase in temperature followed by urban (low built-up area) areas, grass land area, forest land area and waterbodies. The LST and normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) were computed based on changes in LULC which indicates that a strong correlation value was observed between LST and NDVI for urban (high and low built-up areas) areas, grass land area and forest land area. This study demonstrated that an increase in non-evaporating surfaces and a decrease in the vegetation area have increased the surface temperature and modified the temperature of the study area. Remote-sensing techniques were found to be efficient, especially in reducing the time for analysis of urban expansion, and are useful tools to evaluate the impact of urbanisation on LST.