LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES IN RESPONSE TO CHANGES IN FOREST COVER

Land cover/use changes specially the forest cover changes affect the local surface temperature (LST) of the earth. In this study, a combination of remote sensing and GIS techniques was used to scrutinize the interactions between LST anomalies and deforestation in Sardasht County, NW Iran. The land cover/use change layers of the study area were extracted from Landsat satellite imagery based on Binary Encoding classification and change detection technique. The radiometric correction analysis were done for each Landsat image to derive LST map layers. According to the results, a descending trend in forest cover with a total 2560 ha decline in area and an ascending trend of about 4 degrees rise in surface temperature values on both forest and non-forest areas were detected in the study area from 1984 to 2017. The temporal and spatial analysis yielded high rates of reverse temporal correlation (-0.81) between forest areas and LST anomalies while the correlation value of 0.76 was found for non-forest areas and LST. The regression analysis of the values confirmed the correlation values to be trustable at 99 percent. It was also found that the deforested areas of the study area correlates with the LST rise spatially with a very high correlation measure (0.98) with which a tangible interaction of the parameters can be inferred.