Development of a New Built-Up Index: Studying the Impact of Tree and Building Height Variation on Urban Thermal Field Variance Index

Remote sensing technology has been very efficient for mapping and monitoring the land use/landcover patterns like built-up areas for the assessment of the impact of population growth. The pre-existing remote sensing indices have some limitations with respect to distinguishing between built-up and non-built-features, especially bare soil and sandbar. In this study, a new index has been proposed by using satellite pixel spectra-based analysis. The Modified Difference Built-up Index (MDBI), has been able to classify built-up and non-built-up areas using a single calculation, achieving an overall accuracy of 94.06% for the Varanasi city (India) and its nearby region. MDBI uses three LANDSAT-8 satellite bands: BLUE, Near Infrared (NIR), and Short-Wave Infrared 1 (SWIR1). The proper mapping of the built-up region has been essential to analyze the effect of the urban heat island (UHI) and urban heat spots (UHS). In this study, the land surface temperature (LST) of a section of Varanasi city has been computed by a parameter-driven approach. The parameter-driven LST has been computed by using the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) technique. The elevation parameter has improved the parameter-driven predicted LST result. This study will help concerning authorities to deeply understand the thermal ecological facet of a city.