Evaluation of Land Use Change Trend and its Impact on Surface Albedo and Land Surface Temperature in Aharchai Watershed

Abstract

One of the factors affecting human activities is land use change that can lead to changes in surface albedo and land surface temperature and changes in these parameters affect the natural climate of the area. The present study investigates land use change trends and land surface temperature and surface albedo per land use in the Aharchai watershed using Landsat data for a period of 29 years. for this purpose, Landsat 5 (TM) satellite images in 1987 and Landsat 8 (OLI) satellite images were used for 2015 and after various stages of image processing, land use extraction was performed based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method. Classification accuracy according to kappa coefficient was 0.93 and 0.95 and 95.09 and 96.20 respectively. Most land use changes were observed in pastures and later in dry land agriculture. Converting pastures to dry land agriculture has reduced vegetation cover and altered the distribution pattern and trend of increasing land surface temperature and surface albedo levels. This was the case for dry land farming with an increase in temperature of approximately 8 ° C and a surface albedo of 0.03. It is therefore observed that changes in land use at the basin level have resulted in changes in ground surface temperature and surface albedo.

Keywords

• land use changes
• land surface temperature
• surface albedo
• sabal method
• aharchai watershed