Urban green areas and their impact on land surface temperature in semi-arid environments: a case study in Kuwait

Urban green areas are considered significant contributors to environmental quality as they have been shown to reduce temperature and noise levels and improve air quality. Consequently, several studies have analyzed the relationship of surface temperature, vegetation cover, and building density using remote sensing indices. However, existing studies have limitations as they either do not explore this relationship in the context of semi-arid urban regions or do not monitor change over multiple years. To address these issues, this study analyzes the relationships among those indices and their changes over a five-year span (in both winter and summer) in the semi-arid urban region of Kuwait. Results showed that 9% of Kuwait's urban area became vegetated from 2013 to 2019, despite the increase in surface temperature, and 4% went the other way. Both surface temperature and vegetation density were correlated with building density. Yet, both were weakly anticorrelated with each other in the summer and uncorrelated in the winter, perhaps due to the lack of densely vegetated spaces in the study area and Kuwait’s arid climate. Nonetheless, selected areas with high vegetation cover showed a significant reduction in surface temperature in the summer, while in the winter there was no to very weak impact on temperature.