Monitoring land surface temperature in Bahir Dar city and its surrounding using Landsat images

Land surface temperature (LST) is the burning issue in the world since it affects climate and environment at local, regional and global level. Mainly it resulted from urbanization and its associated extreme Land -use and Land-cover (LULC) changes. Therefore, monitoring of LULC alteration is a significant component in examining of LST variation and applying sustainable mitigation measures. The research has the objec-tive to analyze the spatial-temporal patterns of LST and its variation with LULC composition in Bahir Dar city and its surrounding from 1987 to 2017 with fifteen-year intervals using Landsat images. Image pre-processing was done to retrieve NDVI, NDBI, LST and LULC, and urban-rural gradient analysis and LST Intensity (LSTI) were computed. As the result shows that urban areas of Bahir Dar city rapidly expanded since 1987. The mean LST values increased to 34.5 celcius in 1987 to 37.57 celcius in 2002 and decreased to 34.57 celcius in 2017. Paved surface and agricultural land exhibited higher LST values whereas waterbody and vegeta-tion experienced lower LST. The result also shows that LST has a positive relationship with NDBI (1987: R2 = 0.51; 2002: R2 = 0.48; and 2017: R2 = 0.4) and negative relationship with NDVI (1987: R2 = 0.24; 2002: R2 = 0.25; and 2017: R2 = 0.33). The LST increased towards sub-urban areas and LSTI was higher in the distance between 4 and 10 km. The results of this study are significant for urban planners to imple-ment sustainable LST mitigation strategies and create a conducive living environment in Bahir Dar city. & COPY; 2020 National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).