Influence of Landscape patterns of Local Climate Zones on Thermal environment of Bhopal City

 

The Local Climate Zones are known to have significant and distinct thermal environment; however its spatial pattern also determines the thermal characteristics of an area. The purpose of this study is to investigate relationship between landscape patterns of Local Climate Zones and its impact on thermal environment measured here as Land Surface Temperature (LST), taking a case of city of Bhopal, in India. Bhopal has an overall 9 LCZ classes. Three LCZs - compact low-rise areas (LCZ-3), Open low-rise (LCZ-6) and sparsely built (LCZ-9) (p <0.05) makes up the majority of the urban fabric of the city and reveal significant differences in their spatial patterns, as revealed from ANOVA statistics. Further, spatial indices of urban morphology like Patch, Edge index, which defines a number of built-up patches and edge density are correlated with LST patches in 16 LCZs of Bhopal. LCZ-3 is characterized by high Edge and patch densities, as compared to other LCZs and shows maximum surface temperature of 42.90C. LCZ-9 areas are characterized by a high degree of irregularity across almost all shape and form metrics, indicating sparsely dense form. However, there exists negative correlations between LST and landscape metrics of mean SHAPE and SHAPE indices are highly significant. The correlation between LST and landscape indices of development phases of Bhopal city depicted by LCZs, thus confirms the influence of spatial pattern in each LCZ on Land surface temperatures, an indicator of thermal characteristics of an area. The dense urban form pattern has higher value of LST as compared to less compact forms and irregular shapes These results highlight the role of built form regulations in determining landscape patterns that results in forming local microclimates. This research offers important insights on role of urban planning regulations in climate sensitive planning crucial for heat mitigation.