Analysis of urban heat island using Modis and Landsat data over parts of Madhya Pradesh
Student name: Ms Kasturi Deb
Guide: Dr Chander Kumar Singh
Year of completion: 2014
Host Organisation: Defence Terrain Research Lab
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr V.K.Panchal
Abstract: The phenomenon of Urban heat islands (UHI) is a repercussion of the growing
urbanization in today’s times. Open, vegetated, agricultural lands are being covered
with concrete, permeable and moist surfaces have become impermeable and dry.
This gives rise to Urban Heat Islands wherein urban regions experience warmer
temperatures than the rural surroundings (Anon., n.d.). There are various factors
affecting UHI such as the season in which the study is carried out, the climate, the
day, the wind and cloud conditions, topography, rural surroundings, city size, and
many more.
There are three main types of heat islands: - boundary layer, canopy layer and
surface layer. Thermal remote sensing has been used extensively for the analysis of
surface layer UHIs. It has been seen that UHI effect has mostly been measured
keeping in mind the spatial association of the satellite image with the study area.
Most of the studies done in this field make use of high spatial resolution satellite
data (ASTER, Landsat) and then further deliberate on the problem.
The objective of this study is to analyze Urban heat islands by giving more
importance to the temporal aspect of a satellite data. The satellite data of MODIS
and Landsat have been used for the analysis. MODIS gives LST product with a
temporal resolution of 1-2 days but with a coarse spatial resolution of 1km. On the
other hand Landsat data is available at a comparatively finer resolution of 23m but
with a temporal resolution of 16 days. In comparison to the daily data available from
MODIS, Landsat provides only 2-3 data for a period of 30 days. By taking this
problem under consideration we analyze if even with coarse resolution of 1 km can
we use high temporal resolution data for the analysis of Urban heat islands.
Keywords: Urban Heat Islands, high temporal resolution, low spatial resolution,
MODIS,Landsat.
