Land Use/Land Cover changes dynamics and their effects on Surface Urban Heat Island in Bucharest, Romania

The aim of the paper is to examine and analyze the long-term spatial dynamics of LULC (Land Use/Land Cover) and the impact of their changes on the SUHI (Surface Urban Heat Island). The study covered the area of Bucharest Municipality, the capital of Romania and its neighboring areas, and involved a series of Landsat images, taken in the summer, and ranging from 1984 to 2016. To achieve the goal the following were accomplished: (i) a supervised image classification, done with good accuracy and (ii) a post classification change detection approach was used to assess the LULC changes; (iii) the thermal signature for each land use category was determined using LST (Land Surface Temperature); also, iv) NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) has been used to determine a relationship between the thermal behavior and the characteristics of each land use category. The results have revealed that by 2016 there has been an increase in the built-up areas and the fallow land areas and a decrease in the croplands and forested areas. Also, there were observed the increase in surface temperature and a decrease for the difference between the average temperature of the urban area and the surrounding areas of the city indicating the extension of the area where the phenomenon of the Urban Heat Island of Bucharest occurs.