The impact of land use and land cover changes on land surface temperature in the Yangon Urban Area, Myanmar

Yangon Mega City is densely populated and most urbanization area of Myanmar. Rapid urbanization is the main causes of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change and they impact on Land Surface Temperature (LST). The objectives of this study were to investigate on the LST with respect to LULC of Yangon Mega City. For this research, Landsat satellite images of 1996, 2006 and 2014 of Yangon Area were used. Supervised classification with the region of interest and calculated change detection. Ground check points used 348 points for accuracy assessment. The overall accuracy indicated 89.94 percent. The result of this paper, the vegetation area decreased from 1061.08 sq km 2 (24.5%) in 1996 to 483.53 sq km 2 (11.2%) in 2014 and built up area clearly increased from 485.33 sq km 2 (11.2%) in 1996 to 1435.72 sq km 2 (33.1%) in 2014. Although the land surface temperature was higher in built up area and bare land, lower value in cultivated land, vegetation and water area. The results of the image processing pointed out that land surface temperature increased from 23 ˚C, 26 ˚C and 27 ˚C to 36 ˚C, 42 ˚C and 43.3 ˚C for three periods. The findings of this paper revealed a notable changes of land use and land cover and land surface temperature for the future heat management of sustainable urban planning for Yangon Mega city. The relationship of regression experienced between LULC and LST can be found gradually stronger from 0.8323 in 1996, 0.8929 in 2006 and 0.9424 in 2014 respectively.