Assessment of Landscape Change and its Relationships with Surface Temperature and Geo-spatial Indices during 1992 - 2022 at Haldia Industrial Region, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Unplanned local development and alterations in Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) are an early alert for towns and cities around the world. The population pressure has resulted in the conversion of natural land into impermeable areas, which has altered the surface energy budget and created microclimatic differences locally. The main objective of the present study is to estimate LULC changes and its relation to increases Land Surface Temperature (LST) in the Haldia Industrial Region (HIR) of West Bengal using multi-temporal Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) of 1992 and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) of 2022 with 30-m spatial resolution images were obtained from the USGS website. The supervised classification method was applied by using Maximum Likelihood classification (MLC) to classify the satellite images into various LULC classes such as settlement, waterbody, vegetation, agriculture land, and fallow land, respectively. The result suggested an overall increase of settlement area from 13.49 km² in 1992 to 44.54 km² in 2022. On the other hand, the agriculture land decreased from 214.26 km² to 152.34 km² due to fast urbanization, decline green lands, and expansion of barren lands. The outcome result from LST was exhibited that the LST value has increased 3.77°C during 1992 to 2022 in this study area. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was showed a strong negative relationship with LST with a determination coefficient (R²) values found as 0.491 (1992) and 0.356 (2022). The positive determination coefficient between LST with Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) was found as 0.0002 (1992), and 0.0417 (2022). R² values were estimated as 0.174 (1992), and 0.0347 (2022) between LST with Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) that indicated a positive determination coefficient. The findings enhanced understanding of the relationship between urban LST and LULC in developing an inclusive climate resilience policy and making the HIR more sustainable to the effects of climate change.