15. Case Study 7: Assessment, Mapping and Prediction of Urban Heat Island in Srinagar City Region

Urban Heat Island (UHI) refers to the manifestation of relatively higher surface and air temperatures in the urban centres with respect to the immediate surroundings where land use/land cover is generally green in nature (forest or agriculture). It is a local climate system in which the temperatures are observed to follow a slope in the direction radially outwards from the city centre. In this study, UHI of the Srinagar City Region has been mapped along the time series from 1991 to 2020 and the scenario has been predicted also for 2030. Land Surface Temperature (LST), retrieved from the thermal bands of Landsat 5 images for 1991, 1999 and 2010, and from Landsat 8 images of 2020 using Mono-window (MW) Algorithm was used to understand the temperature trend and the evolution of UHI zones in the Srinagar City region. The results show that the mean surface temperature of the study area has shifted from 16.04 ℃ in 1991 to 26.21 ℃ in 2020. In the same time period, the area of UHI zone has grown at a rate of 2.85 km² per year from 1991 to 2020. It expanded from 13.57 km² (1.82% of total area) in 1991 to 96.18 km² (12.90% of total area) in 2020. According to Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN), which was used to predict the mean surface temperature, Srinagar City Region will experience 27.21 ℃ in 2030. This study also predicted the potential scenario of UHI zones for 2030 using Cellular Automata-Markov Chain Integrated Model (CA-Markov). It forecasts that in 2030, with an expansion rate of 12.57 km² per year, UHI zone of Srinagar City Region will expand to 221.94 km² covering 29.77% of the total area, if the present scenarios continue.