Impact of land use land cover change on the land surface temperature: A case study of Shillong

Shillong has been experiencing changes in land use land cover over the past years especially in the town areas where a lot of built-ups are emerging. In response to this, there has been some impacts in the distribution of temperature. In this study, remote sensing techniques have been used. The maximum likelihood method has been used for supervised classification of land use land cover from false color composite images. Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 8 OLI/ TIRS has been used in this study. The study period is 30 years from 1992 – 2022 with an interval of 15 years. The emergence and increase of more built-up and impervious land cover type surfaces has made the land surface temperature to increase. The correlation between NDVI and LST shows a negative relationship while that of NDBI and LST shows a positive relationship. The temperature has been increasing with an average of 2° C each interval of study. The hotspot analysis has been used to demarcate the heat zones. The highest temperature is found in the crowded and high built-up areas while the lowest temperature is found in the vegetated lands which further cause heat island effect in these highly built-up areas.