The Use of NDVI and NDBI to Provide Subsidies to Public Manager’s Decision Making on Maintaining the Thermal Comfort in Urban Areas

Abstract

The use of physical indexes such as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetacion Index) and NDBI (Normalized Difference Built-up Index), related to the variation of Surface Temperature (LST), have been widely used as support for mapping and monitoring land use and occupation, mainly in urban centers, due to, among other factors, changes in the energy balance and, consequently, increase heat of cities. Thus, this study approaches the urban space of the municipality of Paracatu, Minas Gerais (MG) and aims to verify urban growth, through the variation of NDVI, NDBI and LST, between the years 1990 and 2019 by using images of the LANDSAT-5 and LANDSAT-8 satellites. As a final result, an urbanization map of the municipality was obtained, and it was possible to verify that these indexes were adequate to size the environmental impact caused by disordered urbanization, since the degradation of vegetation caused in the area was responsible for reducing and/or increasing the values recorded by the indexes. In addition, the results made it possible to identify areas with higher and lower temperature variations, causing the agility of decision-making and the development of projects that meet the peculiarities of each sector of the city.