Revealing the Changes in Esfahan Heat Island Considering Urban Development

One of the main challenges in urban development processes in developing countries is the change that increasingly occurs in heat islands. Their rapid growth has created many problems for urban management and planning processes. The present study aims to reveal heat island changes using Landsat satellite data during the 1991-2016 statistical period. The satellite images have been pre-processed in four stages, including basic processing, extraction of impenetrable educational levels, assessment of the accuracy, assessment of the accuracy of classification, and retrieval of ground temperature. The results of Kappa coefficient accuracy extraction show that the images of 2016 are more accurate with a coefficient of 0.8341. In terms of location, warm cores match arid lands and poor areas that are clustered in the north and south of the city and in vegetation-free areas. Heat islands are also observed in the city center as small thermal wells. Investigation of how heat island intensity is related to the type of land cover reveals a negative correlation between construction density and vegetation on one hand and surface temperature on the other. Therefore, it can be said that humidity and coveredness of the ground the factors that moderate the heat island in the city of Esfahan.