Monitoring the Land Cover Change and Its Impact on the Land Surface Temperature of Rajshahi City, Bangladesh using GIS and Remote Sensing Techniques

Urban growth possesses significant impact on land cover by replacing natural landscape into impervious surface. Substantial alteration of the green space into built-up areas have influential impact on the land surface temperature of a city. The aim of this study is to identify the land cover change on Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) area for the last twenty years (1998-2018) and to assess the impact of land cover change on land surface temperature. During the last two decades, constant expansion of built-up area within Rajshahi city encroach the substantial amount of vegetation, open space, and waterbody areas, which results in large area of impervious surface. Therefore, two spatial analysis software namely Arc GIS and Erdas Imagine have been used to identify the amount of land cover change and variation in land surface temperature through supervised image classification and spectral radiance calculation methods on Landsat satellite images (1998. 2008 and 2018). The result shows that, the built-up area have been doubled during the last two decades by covering 10.98 and 22.82 square kilometers areas in 1998 and 2018 respectively. With a strong positive correlation between the land surface temperature and the land cover area, the maximum temperature rises from 23.25 to 27.08 degrees Celsius. This trend of Land Surface Temperature indicates, Urban Heat Island is building up within Rajshahi city.