Investigation and Modeling of Physical Growth of Urban Areas and its Impacts on Traffic using Night-time Light Data

Today, the rapid physical growth and development of cities has caused significant changes in their physical and functional characteristics, and as a result, many problems have arisen. The cities of Tehran and Tabriz, as the two metropolises of Iran, are no exception to this rule, because the reason for their development in recent years and the concentration and overcrowding of various uses, especially commercial uses and medical services in the central sector, issues and problems for transportation network failure. It has created two cities. Accordingly, in the present study, these two metropolises have been studied. Remote sensing observations at night provide us with an explicit and timely measurement of human activities. Numerous studies have shown that night light (NTL) can be used as a proxy for a number of variables, including urbanization, density, and economic growth. Accordingly, in this study, we examined urban growth and its effects using remote sensing at night. For this purpose, satellite images of SOUMI NPP, LANDSAT 8 and LANDSAT 7 as well as traffic information obtained from Google map were used, using ENVI 5.3, QGIS 3.10, ARC GIS 10.3 software, Google Earth Engine system and MATLAB software. This data was done. First, the physical development of the studied cities was investigated using the BUNTUS algorithm (urban built-up areas, night light image and travel time for the city limits). The results showed that both cities had a slight slope growth during this nine-year period (2020-2012). After calculating urban growth to study urban traffic, regression was performed between traffic information and numerical value of image pixels (DN) using MATLAB software, which showed the correlation between these two layers of information.