Quantifying the effect of surface covering materials on land surface temperature in urban areas utilizing Landsat imageries: An investigation of Kandy City, Sri Lanka

This paper attempts to investigate whether there is an effect of surface covering materials on land surface temperature in Kandy city, Sri Lanka by employing GIS and RS techniques. Measuring the change in built-up area, detecting the correspondent change in land surface temperature and identifying the correlation between surface covering materials and land surface temperature in temporal basis are the objectives of this paper. The paper utilizes Urban Index (UI), Land Surface Temperature (LST) and simple linear regression technique to achieve the objectives. Landsat satellite images with moderate resolution in 1994, 2003, 2007 and 2015 obtained from the server of United State Geological Survey (USGS) were used. Results evidently illustrates that both surface covering materials and land surface temperature in the city have substantially increased during the last-twenty-year period. The mean temperature in the city has risen from by 5.83 C0 degrees from 1994 (23.78 C0) to 2015 (29.61 C0). Simple linear regression analysis indicates that there is an obvious impact of increase in surface covering materials on the surface temperature rise in Kandy city.