An exploratory analysis of urbanization effects on climatic variables: a study using Google Earth Engine

Rapid global economic expansion has resulted in a drastic increase of urbanization while impacting the Earth’s entire ecology. This study evaluates the impact of historical land-use/land-cover (LU/LC) change signatures on seasonal variation of climatic variables using a cloud platform-Google Earth Engine. Due to rapid urbanization and the noticeable spatio-temporal difference in the climate, administrative units of Dakshina Kannada district are taken for demonstration. The LU/LC of the district extracted from high-resolution images of Landsat using random forest classification, land surface temperature (LST) extracted from the thermal band of Landsat images using the mono window algorithm, evapotranspiration (ET) data extracted from MOD16A2.006 and precipitation data from CHIPRS was used. The data was extracted for the pre-monsoon and post-monsoon period 2001–2019. The district has seen a 13.67% reduction in the forest area with 18.81% increase in the built-up areas. The LST and ET has seen a progressive drift in the past two decades, with an increase of 4.07 °C in median temperature in forest areas and a decline of 2.19 mm in median ET value, which necessitates monitoring forest encroachment. The higher variation in maximum LST in built-up land ( 0.36 ∘ C/year/sq.km ) (near the industrial area) indicates that LU/LC change signature is the predominant driving factor and is associated with the physical characteristics of the built-up area. The ET exhibited a decreasing rate of 0.62 mm/year/sq.km of the built-up land. This study highlights the power of Google Earth Engine and free availability of satellite data in environmental protection, land-use management and sustainable development in the region.