Assessment of the Growth of Urban Heat Island in a Mediterranean Environment: A Pathway Toward a Sustainable City

Rapid urbanization can induce significant changes in the urban climate. It is a great threat to the urban environment and human life quality. Therefore, sustainable urban development needs to find a balance between urban expansion and the thermal environment. This chapter proposes a methodology for monitoring and quantifying the growth of urban heat island (UHI) in response to land-use land-cover (LULC) change impacts based on a time series of Landsat remote sensing-based images and geospatial tools. The work was conducted in the city of Meknes, located in the central part of Morocco, as a case study. First, Land Surface Temperature (LST) was calculated from 1990 to 2020 using the thermal bands of Landsat images. Second, LULC and several vegetation indices were assessed, and the MOD11A1 MODIS product was used to develop the LST time series from 2000 to 2021 using the Google Earth engine platform. The results showed that the maximum LST in Meknes has increased by almost 10 °C during the past decades, and an overlay of the land surface temperatures with several land cover indicators shows that the increase in land surface temperatures is clearly correlated with the conversion of vegetation cover to built-up areas. The analysis of land use land cover changes (LULCC) showed an increase for the urban area and the arboriculture of about 12.6 and 6.07 km², respectively, in the same period, whereas the cereals and peri-urban areas were reduced by 16.18 and 2.52 km² respectively.