A sub-pixel analysis of urbanization effect on land surface temperature and its interplay with impervious surface and vegetation coverage in Indianapolis,United States

This study developed an analytical procedure based upon a spectral unmixing model for characterizing and quantifying urban landscape changes in Indianapolis, Indiana, the United States, and for examining the environmental impact of such changes on land surface temperatures (LST). Three dates of Landsat TM/ETM+ images, acquired in 1991, 1995, and 2000, respectively, were utilized to document the historical morphological changes in impervious surface and vegetation coverage and to analyze the relationship between these changes and those occurred in LST. Three fraction endmembers, i.e., impervious surface, green vegetation, and shade, were derived with an unconstrained least-squares solution. A hybrid classification procedure, which combined maximum-likelihood and decision-tree algorithms, was developed to classify the fraction images into land use and land cover classes. Correlation analyses were conducted to investigate the changing relationships of LST with impervious surface and vegetation coverage. Results indicate that multi-temporal fraction images were effective for quantifying the dynamics of urban morphology and for deriving a reliable measurement of environmental variables such as vegetation abundance and impervious surface coverage. Urbanization created an evolved inverse relationship between impervious and vegetation coverage, and brought about new LST patterns because of LST's correlations with both impervious and vegetation coverage. Further researches should be directed to refine spectral mixture modeling by stratification, and by the use of multiple endmembers and hyperspectral imagery.