Seasonal Analysis of Urban Heat Island of Greater Hyderabad Using Thermal Remote Sensing

Urban areas are characterized by densely built-up area. Due to urbanization and consequent urban growth, green spaces, water bodies and other land use changes are resulting in several environmental issues and concerns. One such urban environmental issue is the emergence of Urban Heat Island. An Urban Heat Island (UHI) is the characteristics of elevated temperaturere of both atmosphere and land surface in urban areas as compared with the un-urbanized surrounding or rural areas. In this work, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) of mega city of Hyderabad is extracted with the help of remote sensing data. For the present study, Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS) data pertaining to the year 2015 is used. The main objective this study is to identify and map Urban Heat Island. Seasonal variations in the Land Surface Temperature (LST) are analyzed for the month of May and December. It is seen from the analysis of Land Surface Temperature (LST) that, the urban areas have recorded higher temperature as compared to its rural counterpart. It is also seen that emergence of Urban Heat Island is very conspicuous during the night time. The temperature variation between urban-rural surroundings varies between 29.11 and 21.69°C in the month of May (summer) whereas it ranged between 23.71 and 16.14°C in the month of December (winter). The variations in the night temperature is maximum during summer season. Keywords: Urbanization, remote sensing, land surface temperature, urban heat island  Cite this Article Sridhar N, Vijaya Bhole. Seasonal Analysis of Urban Heat Island of Greater Hyderabad Using Thermal Remote Sensing. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2018; 9(1): 49–56p.