The relationship between land surface temperature and land use/land cover in Guangzhou,China

The integration of remote sensing, geographic information system, landscape ecology and statistical analysis methods was applied to study the urban thermal environment in Guangzhou. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Build-up Index (NDBI), Normalized Difference Barren Index (NDBaI) and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) were used to analyze the relationships between land surface temperature (LST) and land use/land cover (LULC) qualitatively. The result revealed that, most urban built-up lands were located in the middle part, and high LST areas mostly and were in the middle and southern parts. Therefore, the urbanization and thermal environment in the middle and southern parts need to be determined. Land surface temperature increased with the density of urban built-up and barren land, but decreased with vegetation cover. The relationship between MNDWI and LST was found to be negative, which implied that pure water would decrease the surface temperature and the polluted water would increase the surface temperature. A multiple regression between LST and each indices as well as the elevation was created to elevate the urban thermal environment, which showed that NDVI, NDBI, NDBaI, MNDWI were effective indicators for quantifying LULC impacts on LST.