Urban morphology detection and it's linking with land surface temperature: A case study for Tehran Metropolis, Iran

Expansion of urban areas and alteration of natural land cover exacerbate the local climate change. To find out the effect of land cover changes on the local climate, in this study, the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) concept was utilized to detect urban morphology in Tehran Metropolis. LCZ and Land Surface Temperature (LST) can be identified and classified based on available remote sensing products. Firstly, LCZ maps of Tehran metropolis were extracted using Landsat imagery, and secondly, relationships between LCZ and LST were explored for three years (1990, 2004, and 2018). We found that Tehran urban structure has 13 LCZs based on imagery from Landsat 5 and 14 LCZs based on images for Landsat 7 and 8. Overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were estimated at 62% and 0.60, respectively. Results show that built-up classes including compact high-rise, compact mid-rise, and heavy industrial areas tended to increase the surface temperature, while except for bare land, all other land cover types tended to decrease the surface temperature. The findings also suggest that complementary optical and thermal remote sensing data, such as the combination of OLI with TIRS imageries, were sufficient for supervised LCZ and LST classification in a semi-arid region of Tehran metropolis.