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Impact of urban expansion on land surface temperature in Dodoma and Morogoro Metropolises, Tanzania
Abstract
The study aims to evaluate the impact of metropolitan growth on land surface temperature (LST) in Dodoma and Morogoro metropolises. The paper adopts remote sensing methods to extract and analyze time-series Landsat satellite images from 2000 to 2018. An administered taxonomy was applied to map urban land-use change. Thermal and reflectance bands analysis were employed to retrieve and compare the Surface Temperature, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), urban expansion patterns, and the overall growth prominence in the cities. The results highlight a negative correlation between LST and NDVI, indicating that dissipating vegetation cover within the two study areas was responsible for the increase in LST over the study period. The outcome also showed that the metropolis of the study area rapidly expanded over the evaluation period with impermeable surface from 1.6% in 2000 to 5.3% in 2018 while non-impermeable decreased from 98.4% in 2000 to 94.7% in 2018. Increasing LST of annual-average of 31% in 2000 to 32% in 2018 was mostly due to conversion to the built-up area from non-built area. Therefore, the study concludes that LST is strongly influenced by land cover dynamics. The study suggests that planning of African cities should incorporate with sustainable and resilient urban future in order to improve the planning, compactness, sustainability and resilience of the urban environment.