Analysis of the relationship between NDVI and land surface temperature as a technique in the urban planning of the counties

Abstract

The fast population growth and the great exploitation of the natural resources, imply great modifications in the environment causing environmental impacts, among them, the average temperature increases of the Earth. In that sense, several studies tried to understand the influence of these impacts on the health of the organisms. This study aimed to analyze the relationship between NDVI values and surface temperature variations, in order to understand the relation of vegetation in the urban thermal variation of midsize cities. This work used satellites free available images by the American Geological Survey and the processing employed R language. In order to generate the NDVI, we chose to use the Sentinel-2 image with 10 m spatial resolution, and for the calculation of the temperature, we used a Landsat 8 scene with 30 m spatial resolution, once it has a thermal band. There is a moderate negative relation in the temperature variations according to the absence or presence of vegetation in the terrestrial surface (p<0.05). The NDVI and LST exhibited inversely proportional spatial distribution. Understanding the effects of changing land cover allows greater agility in decision making by public managers in order to mitigate the effects of urban heat and the formation of heat islands by vegetation insertion in densely occupied areas.

Keywords

• r programming
• urban heat islands
• urban afforestation
• municipal management