SSD Analyze for the Assessment of Long Term Thermal Effect of Urbanization on the Izmir City’s Local Climate Change

Abstract

Background: Urbanization provides several opportunities to human being to live better and comfortable life. On the other hand, it also comes with some costs and side effects like worsen climate conditions. In local concept, pre-climate conditions in rural area can be called as natural when they are compared against post-climate conditions after urbanization expands over and swallows these natural areas. So, these natural conditions are changed to worsen conditions by some civic activities in cities through urbanization. One of the urbanization side effects is thermal pollution caused by specific urban activities and patterns on land surfaces in cities. Thus, thermal pollution changes city’s local climate and negatively affects the city’s comfort level at least locally. There are several researches focusing on that issue in cities. Each one made its contribution to the area to build up a strong knowledge. One great contribution comes from the researches focusing on analyzing time serious thermal data with continuous distribution over cities.Method: Here in this research is introduced and suggested a Simulated Single Data (SSD) statistical analyze method for the studies based on time serious data. Therefore the method was applied to Remote Sensing (RS) LANDSAT satellites’ bands especially to time series’ thermal bands of Izmir city to reveal where generally Urban Hot Spots (UHS) appear and Urban Heat Islands (UHI) develop in the city w.r.t. this SSD image from long period of time. Stereo representation of the study region is also used to visually examine the topographical effect on UHI distribution.Conclusions: The study clearly demonstrated that industrial regions and roads with large surfaces, somehow bare lands even with spare bushes or grassy lands and more significantly the slope urban land parts within special aspects are the main contributors of UHSs and UHI developments in the city even w.r.t. long term data. Thus those contributors affect the city pre-natural climate conditions negatively and then let UHSs to appear and UHIs to develop at and around where these urban land cover structures are located or seen in the city. Those city parts are the most risky zones that city authorities take serious actions for caring their city chronical climate (thermal) conditions and to focus on for returning these zones back to their pre-natural climate environmental conditions. There are also some nature based solutions that are given and suggested in the conclusion section of the paper for compensation of the effects caused by those contributors in the city.