Determination of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Potential Urban Heat Island Effect in Parts of Lagos State using Satellite Imageries

Abstract

Temperature is an important component of the climate. The temperature of a developing city or state is constantly changing. The trend in temperature change in Nigeria is not consistent. Changes in temperature appear to be closely related to concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The degree of concentration depends on human interventions and the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface. Lagos State particularly in recent time has experienced decrease in vegetation and water pervious surfaces, which reduces surface temperature through evapotranspiration. This is as a result of rapid urbanization arising from inundating rural-urban migration. One of the implications is that anthropogenic heat is released to the environment due to energy consumption and increased impervious surface coverage thereby increasing the surface and atmospheric temperatures. LandSat Satellite imageries have been used to estimate Land Surface Temperature (LST) and urban thermal conditions. The mean LST result shows that, there is a significant increase in the temperature values from 1984 to 2002 (28.40^oC-28.86^oC). However, in 2006 the temperature decreases significantly to 28.37^oC below 2002 temperatures in all LGAs. This variation could be attributed to the economic crisis/power outage in Nigeria which left manufacturing companies out of production/manufacturing between 2002 and 2006. Findings from this study reveals that there is a relationship between the surface temperature and the various Land Cover types. It shows a broad classification of the Land Cover types into Water bodies, Vegetation and Built-up areas respectively. With the spatial resolution and temporal coverage of two Landsat data of the environment, the derivation of the temperature information was achieved.