Macro- and micro-level studies using Urban Heat Islands to simulate effects of greening, building materials and other mitigating factors in Mumbai city

ABSTRACT

A problem common to cities around the world is the formation and intensification of Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) [Weng, Dengsheng, and Schubring 2004. “Estimation of Land Surface Temperature – Vegetation Abundance Relationship for Urban.” Remote Sensing of Environment 89: 467–483]. Heat Islands are present in almost every city [Sobrino and Leonardo. 2004. “Land Surface Temperature Retrieval from LANDSAT TM 5.” Remote Sensing of Environment 90: 434–440]. Urbanization leads to replacement of forest and vegetative regions with the impervious materials like concrete, asphalt, bricks, etc. [Rizwan, Dennis, and Liu 2008. “A Review on the Generation, Determination and Mitigation of Urban Heat Island.” Journal of Environmental Sciences 20 (1): 120–128; Turner, 2016. “Land System Architecture for Urban Sustainability: New Directions for Land System Science Illustrated by Application to the Urban Heat Island Problem.” Journal of Land Use Science 11 (6): 689–697]. A large amount of land cover is transformed into the concrete and asphalted surface [Akbari, Pomerantz, and Taha 2001. “Cool Surfaces and Shade Trees to Reduce Energy Use and Improve Air Quality in Urban Areas.” Solar Energy 70 (3): 295–310]. The study analyses UHIs at two different levels, macro-level and micro-level. Macro-level study is carried out on whole Mumbai city to find out the hotspots on different landuse/landcover. The main reasons for differences in temperatures in these areas were studied. Land surface temperature in the areas like Airport in Mumbai increased by 6.5% from January 1999 to January 2013 and around 12% from April 1999 to 2013. In the micro-level, two areas were selected, one barren and other green to analyse the impact of land cover on the heat in the city.

KEYWORDS:

• LST
• Landsat
• UHI
• temporal
• urbanization
• evapotranspiration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.