SSI Analysis of Long-Term UHI Development Due To Urbanization Affecting Urban Ecosystem and Local Climate Change Through City of Izmir Case
Authors: CORUMLUOGLU OZSEN , Çorumluoğlu Özşen 
Published: November 2021

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 worsening climate conditions. In the local sense, the previous climatic conditions in the rural areas can be called the natural when the subsequent climatic conditions after the widespread urbanization and the absorption of these natural areas are compared. So, during the urbanization process, the natural conditions of the pre-urban areas are getting worse due to the civic activities in the cities. One of the side effects of urbanization is thermal pollution caused by certain urban activities and sectoral urban designs and also related patterns on the land surfaces of cities. Thus, thermal pollution changes city’s local climate over time 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 Image (SSI) method based on Simulated Single Data (SSD) statistical analyze approach for the studies based on time serious data. Therefore, SSI method using time series data 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. Stereo representation of the study region is also used to visually examine the topographical effect on UHI distribution in the city. Since all those analyses depend on SSI analyse, all analyses represent over and over time confirmation.
Conclusions

The study clearly demonstrated that industrial regions and roads with large surfaces, somehow bare lands even with spare bushes, empty but sparse grassy urban lands and more significantly the urban land parts faced to certain directions are the main urban land cover and structure types contributing UHSs to appear and UHI developments in the city that are strongly confirmed over and over again with long term data. Thus, these contributing factors adversely affect the previous natural climate in the lands that latter swallowed by the city 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 over time. Those city parts are the riskiest zones that city authorities take serious actions for caring their city chronical climate (thermal) conditions and to focus on for returning these zones back into their previous natural climate and environment 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.