Identification of spatial structure of land surface temperature over Zayanderoud River Basin based on numerical remote sensing data

Soil temperature and its changes both in space and time is one of the most important factors that not only affect matter and energy transfer in soil but also influence the direction and amount of all of the physical processes in soil whether directly or indirectly. Soil temperature depend to several factors including topography, sun radiation, air temperature, amount of soil moisture, the thermal properties such as heat capacity, coefficient of thermal conduction and specific heat. The goal of this study is to identify the spatial structure of land surface temperature in Zayanderoud River Basin. In order to achieve this goal the daily time series of land surface temperature from MODIS Terra was exploited from 1379 to 1393 from NASA web site. MODIS Terra data are available in 1*1 km in sinusoidal projection system. By only appalling the data over Zayanderoud Basin 48347 pixels covered the Basin. The corner stone for our analysis of temperature was 48347 pixels. After preparation of data over Zayanderoud Basin the long term mean temperature of each month was then calculated and the long term mean map of each season was drawn in Matlab. The findings indicated that the warmest month in the Basin is Mordad but the coldest is the month of Dey. The clustering of the pixels of months using Ward method based on the matrix of 12 * 48347 dimensions showed that three separate seasons can be identified in the Basin. Over all the findings and investigations of this paper increased our knowledge toward the spatial structure of land surface temperature in Zayanderoud River Basin.