Evaluation of the Relationship Between Snow Cover Index and Land Surface Temperature for Sulaymaniyah City, Iraq

Abstract

Changes in land surface reflectance measured by remote sensing data can be useful in climate change studies. This study attempts to Evaluation of the relationship between Snow cover index and Land surface temperature for by used Normalized snow index (S3), Land Surface Temperature (LST), in Sulaymaniyah city, northeastern Iraq. Data from Landsat5 TM and Landsat8 OLI images were used to detect the change in snow cover and land surface temperature during the study period years 1987, 1999, 2009, and 2022. ArcGIS 10.8 is used to determine the variations and calculate S3, NDVI, and LST index indices. All S3 maps have shown a decrease trend from 1987 to 2022 which depicted decreases of snow cover area. Also, LST has increased from 13°C in 1987 to 19 °C in 2022. also the results showed S3 and LST correlation has a strong reverse relationship existed in each year. The reverse relationship found between S3 and LST indicates that areas in which increase land surface temperature it leads to inducing much changes in snow cover.