Studying the Impact of Urban Management Strategies and Spatiotemporal Dynamics of LULC on Land Surface Temperature and SUHI Formation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This study focuses on examining the historical trends of the surface urban heat island (SUHI) in relation to land use/cover (LULC) changes in Jeddah City from 2013 to 2022 using Landsat data. To achieve this, various parameters were analyzed, including LULC changes, normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and LST. During this timeframe, Jeddah City underwent a comprehensive development initiative aimed at demolishing informal and illegal settlements and improving the overall quality of life, aligning with the Kingdom’s 2030 vision. This provides an interesting opportunity to investigate the effect of these urban transformations on the variation, presence, and intensity of SUHIs. Based on the results, a significant positive correlation between the density of built-up and LST was found, while a negative relationship was noticed between NDVI and LST for all time points. Furthermore, a remarkable observation in 2022 was the complete absence of the SUHI phenomenon following the removal of old informal settlements from the city. The outcomes of this study highlight the impact of urban development and hold the potential to uncover environmental imbalances and contribute to the development of strategies to mitigate the negative effects of LULC changes, thereby restraining the rise in LST.