Urban Heat Island Dynamics in Response to Land-Use/Land-Cover Change in the Coastal City of Mumbai

The rapid urbanization and land-use/land-cover (LU/LC) changes have resulted in the unplanned and unsustainable growth of the Indian cities. This has resulted in a number of environmental issues such as escalating the urban heat island (UHI) intensity over the cities. Therefore, this study was designed to model and quantify the UHI dynamics of Mumbai city in response to the LU/LC change during 1991–2018 using temporal Landsat datasets. The result shows a significant decline in vegetation cover from 215.8 to 129.27 km2, while the built-up areas have almost doubled, i.e., from 173.09 to 346.02 km2 in the Mumbai city during 1991–2018. As a consequence of this, a significant increase in the LST has been noticed in both urban heat island (UHI) and non-UHI zones. Although the areas under UHI zones have not increased significantly, the land surface temperature (LST) gap (difference between minimum and maximum LST) has declined in the Mumbai city from 30.04 °C in 1991 to 20.7 °C in 2018. Further, the minimum and mean LST over each LU/LC classes have also shown a significant increase. On the other hand, the regression analysis shows that the association between UHI and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) has increased in the city, while the association of vegetation density (NDVI) and normalized difference bareness index (NDBaI) has declined in the city. The study can provide useful insights into the process of urban planning and policy makings for urban spatial planning and UHI mitigation strategies.