Analysis of Land Use Land Cover Changes and Their Impacts on the Urban Heat Island Effect in Bragança, Portugal

The viability of urban life requires a series of changes in Land Use Land Cover (LULC), incorporating anthropic elements at the expense of vegetated areas, changing the land cover, which affects surface albedo. One of the impacts could be the formation of an Urban Heat Island (UHI), where temperatures are higher in cities compared to the vegetated surrounding areas, especially after sunset. Remote Sensing (RS) data, such as Land Surface Temperature (LST), image classification algorithms, and vegetation indices, can be used to understand this dynamic. This research aimed to assess the sensitivity of RS products to LULC changes and evaluate the surface thermal behaviour of (Portugal) between 2016 and 2023, during summer and winter. RS was able to identify some changes in LULC and ascertain that LST, in general, was higher in anthropic areas, especially during the summer.