Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Modeling Earth Systems and Environment https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-018-0463-8 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Assessment of the thermal response of variations in land surface around an urban area Mojolaoluwa Toluwalase Daramola 1  · Emmanuel Olaoluwa Eresanya 1,2  · Kazeem Abiodun Ishola 1,3 Received: 15 January 2018 / Accepted: 7 April 2018 © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The ancient city of Ibadan has experienced major development and this development has led to modifcations of the land surface over the years. This study assessed the changes that have occurred in the Land Use Land Cover (LULC) of Ibadan city using satellite image from Landsat covering 1984, 2000 and 2016. Supervised classifcation scheme was done using the maximum likelihood classifer for classifying the images. The extent of change of the LULC classes was performed on the classifed images using Land Change Modeller (LCM). The implication of the change in LULC on Land Surface Tempera- ture (LST) and related indices was assessed. Over a period of 32 years (1984–2016), the area coverage of the built-up region of Ibadan increased from 11.23 to 54.64 hectares in thousands with a net change of 8%. Thick vegetation was identifed as the major contributor to the increase in the built-up area thus indicating urban encroachment. The implication of this was observed in thermal hotspots distribution and increase in the average LST over Ibadan as there was a decrease in vegetated surfaces that dampen the LST and an increase in the impervious surface revealed by the impervious and built-up index. In general, this study showed the capability of impervious surface indices in depicting the variations in land use land cover around a region, majorly urban sprawl. Furthermore, the evaluation of the spectral indices showed Urban Index (UI) as the best predictor LST. Keywords Land cover change · Impervious surface · Land surface temperature · Population · Spectral indices Introduction The biophysical environment is severely modifed by the variations that occur in land use land cover. These variations include; decrease in naturally vegetated area such as highly forested areas, loss of agricultural lands, increase in barren areas, increase in impermeable surfaces, etc. A major land use that has expanded over time is the impervious surfaces. Impervious surfaces are typically described as land surface features created by humans through which water cannot permeate the ground. Human-induced land cover amount to nearly 40% of the earth’s surface and the naturally vegetated environments have been modifed to impervious sur faces (Sterling and Ducharne 2008). Impervious surfaces are sig- nifcant pointers to the state of the environment inasmuch as they have substantial consequences for several biophysical processes such as urban heat islands efect, surface energy budget, transport of water pollutants and deterioration of water quality. Impervious surfaces cause increased storm water runof which consequently increases foods in urban streams (Rose and Peters 2001; Burns et al. 2005). As a result of the replacement of the land cover with impervious surfaces which give rise to reduction of evapotranspiration (Carlson 1986), and therefore sensible heat fux increase, temperature gradient exists between the areas dominated by impervious surfaces and natural vegetation. Across various cities globally, studies have revealed that the proportion of green areas that should be preserved, are being urbanized (Rosenzweig et al. 2006; Kim and Pauleit 2007; Qiao et al. 2013; Kandel et al. 2016). Depletion of these green areas may result to deprivation and reduction in the biodiversity and consequently distort the urban ecosys- tem (Kim and Pauleit 2007). Due to the importance of urban * Mojolaoluwa Toluwalase Daramola daramolamt@futa.edu.ng 1 Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, Federal University of Technology, P.M.B. 704, Akure, Nigeria 2 Department of Marine Science and Technology, Federal University of Technology, P.M.B. 704, Akure, Nigeria 3 Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland