Assessment of the Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Change on Land Surface Temperature: A Case Study of Chiro Town and Its Surrounding, Ethiopia

Abstract

Land use land cover change is the main cause of global climate change and currently, it is a rising trend globally in general and in Ethiopia. It has a significant influence on land use by substituting areas of natural resources and vegetation with impervious surfaces like built-up asphalt road and parking lots; this in turn increases the land surface temperature. chiro town and its surrounding high temperature season get increasingly warmer over time. Changing areas of natural resources in to different impervious surfaces in chiro town and its surrounding case Changes in land surface temperature. The objective of the study was to assess the impact of land use land cover change on LST in and around Chiro town. Supervised classification with maximum likelihood algorithm was used to assess the LULC changes and the split-window algorithm was used to extract LST from Landsat imageries which were acquired from 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020 of the same seasons and MODIS land surface temperature was used to validate LST that was derived from Landsat thermal bands. Pearson correlation was used to analyze the relationship between land surface temperature and LULC indices (NDVI and NDBI). The results show that there is a significant change in LULC especially the built-up area of the study which becomes more than triple over the study period from 4.4% - 15%. However, Vegetation areas are decreased from 13.4% to 12.4 % from 1990 to 2020. Agricultural and bare land areas are also decreased from 65.07% to 60.3% and 17.16% to 12.3% respectively through the study period. This study shows that the land surface temperature of study area ranges from 7 ℃ to 41 ℃ from 1990- 2020. Land surface temperature has a positive relationship with NDBI and a negative association between NDVI. Vegetated land has low LST. However, most of the agricultural land, bare land, and built up of study area have high LST. There was a LULC change in study area and it causes an increase in LST from 1990-2020. The output of the study provides useful information for land use planners and decision makers to make better decisions in improving future land use policies and formulating management strategies within the framework of sustainable land use planning for environmental protection.