Environmental Impacts of Urban Sprawl in Surat, Gujarat: An Examination Using Landsat Data

This study examines the environmental impacts of urban sprawl in Surat inner city in India. Urban sprawl is examined by studying land-use land-cover change from 1998 to 2016. Changes in spatial characteristics of urban land cover are further verified using Shannon’s entropy. The impact of urban sprawl is examined by computing normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference water index (NDWI) and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) values. Land surface temperature (LST) is also calculated using thermal band of multi-temporal Landsat data. Regression analysis is used to calculate the correlation between LST and NDVI, NDWI and NDBI. The study showed a negative correlation between NDVI, NDWI and LST and a positive correlation between NDBI and LST. Urban areas in Surat have grown an approximately 60.41 sq.km, a 102% increase while surface temperature in Surat inner city has risen by 5.1 °C during the study period. The study also showed that temperature increase was particularly pronounced throughout areas classified as urban and bare soil and showed an increasing trend in parts of the city with dense urban areas.