Spatial Autocorrelation of Land Surface Temperature and its Relationship With Land Use in Ahvaz City

Urban heat islands could have destructive effects on the environment and increase energy consumption. The present study aimed to investigate the spatial autocorrelation of land surface temperature and its relationship with land use in Ahvaz city. Daily and Night Land surface temperature maps were extracted from the split window method for the Landsat 8 satellite image and MOD11A1 product, respectively. Land use maps of the study were extracted into five classes: Built-up area, vegetation, bare land, water, and Karun River. Based on the results, Global Moran's index on day and night was equal to 0.94 and 0.9, respectively, according to which Land Surface temperature is distributed in a cluster form. Results of Getis-ord GI statistics showed that the largest area of daily and nightly hot spots in the east of Ahvaz was obtained with 5050.53 and 8055.69 ha, respectively. The results of the Kruskal Wallis test showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the average temperature of land uses (p-value<0.05), so industrial areas and bare land had the highest temperature and the water bodies and vegetation had the lowest temperature. The results also showed that LST has a negative relationship with NDVI (r = -0.47); however, the average NDVI index in the study area was equal to 0.17 which indicated the poor quality of vegetation in Ahvaz. Therefore, it is necessary to take measures to improve the quality of vegetation and expand the urban green space and preserve water resources to adjust the land surface temperature in Ahvaz.