THERMAL REMOTE SENSING OF URBAN CLIMATES IN SOUTH AFRICA THROUGH THE MONO-WINDOW ALGORITHM

Abstract

Urban Heat Island (UHI) is among some of the challenges plaguing urban environments. There is increase human population within urban environments especially in the developing world, which is a need to understand the climates for their wellbeing. The use of multispectral satellite remote sensing to investigate the climatic conditions through radiation measurement is applied across the two major South African cities. The thermal remote sensing technique applied for this study is the direct determination of land surface temperatures (LST) using multispectral thermal imagery (ETM+). In addition, meteorological data which included air temperature and relative humidity for the same satellite image dates were used. The LST values obtained showed Johannesburg has many micro heat islands scattered across the metro than in Cape Town. These areas of heat islands corresponded to areas of human settlement and more so the unplanned as opposed to the planned ones. The estimated LST values and observed air temperature values with an R² of 0.9. It could be concluded that expansion of urban areas in South Africa has led to increased thermal radiation of land surface in densely populated areas.