English Abstract
Abstract:
The Kingdom of Bahrain is considered highly vulnerable to climate change impacts in various ways that may negatively impact the health of the country's citizens and the country's environmental and economic status. This research aims to study the Urban Heat Island (UHI) and its relationship with the changes in the Land Use Land Cover (LULC) in Bahrain, which relies entirely on extracting the Land Surface Temperature (LST) data from the satellite images, to identify the pattern, distribution, and the increases of the temperature in Bahrain over past years and seasons. In addition, anomalies of Bahrain temperatures and the extent of the temperature and humidity impact on human health were identified over the research period and during the different seasons. A set of different methodologies were used to achieve the objectives of the study, including tracking anomalous temperatures, implementing the heat index, extracting spatial LST, employing the UHI equation to get the spatial distribution of the UHI phenomena, and identifying LULC through supervised image classification based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Spatial environmental models were built to preprocess, analyze, and manage all the data to identify changes in LST, UHI, and LULC phenomena. One of the most important findings of this study is that temperature anomalies have begun to occur frequently in Bahrain since the end of the 90s and that Bahrain is exposed to frequent heat waves during the seasons of the year (from 1.0 to 4.0 degrees in Summer, 1.0 to 3.7 degrees in Spring, 1.5 to 3.6 degrees in Winter, and 1.0 to 3.5 degrees in Autumn), which can have significant effects on human health, especially if these high temperatures are linked to the high
relative humidity rates that Bahrain witnesses for most months of the year. Bahrain's Heat index shows that most months are within the high heat disorder range (more than 90). The locations of hotspots of the LST exceeding 50oC have been identified, significantly affecting the formation of the UHI. Moreover, the study revealed a group of human activities and different LULC classes that negatively affect temperatures in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Those locations with high LST were categorized by their industrial, commercial, and residential anthropogenic activities. Furthermore, natural locations such as Sabkhas appeared to be high LST locations. LULC areas were correlated positively with maximum LST values regarding the built-up,
vegetated, and reclaimed areas. On the other hand, LULC areas correlated to the maximum LST negatively in the bare land, wetlands, and waterbody locations.
