Abstract:
The recent climatological studies carried out by several scholars have
demonstrated that the surface temperature in urban areas is higher than the
neighbouring vegetated areas. Unavailability of data for a large number of stations
in a relatively small area is one of the major constraints to the study this problem.
One solution to this is to use space-borne data to estimate temperature variation
over an area. The present study is based on Landsat ETM+ (2003) data and socioeconomic
data. A very significant distance-decay relationship exists between the
temperature and the distance from the centre of City of Colmbo. Demography and
land use are positively correlated with the surface temperature in the city of
Colombo, whilst Normalized Different Vegetation Index (NDVI) demonstrates a
significant negative relationship.
