THE EFFECT OF LAND USE CHANGE ON LAND SURFACE TEMPERATURE IN THE NETHERLANDS

The Netherlands is a small country with a relatively large population which experienced a rapid rate of land use changes from 2000 to 2008 years due to the industrialization and population increase. Land use change is especially related to the urban expansion and open agriculture reduction due to the enhanced economic growth. This research reports an investigation into the application of remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) in combination with statistical methods to provide a quantitative information on the effect of land use change on the land surface temperature. In this study, remote sensing techniques were used to retrieve the land surface temperature (LST) by using the MODIS Terra (MOD11A2) Satellite imagery product. As land use change alters the thermal environment, the land surface temperature (LST) could be a proper change indicator to show the thermal changes in relation with land use changes. The Geographical information system was further applied to extract the mean yearly land surface temperature (LST) for each land use type and each province in the 2003, 2006 and 2008 years, by using the zonal statistic techniques. The results show that, the inland water and offshore area has the highest night land surface temperature (LST). Furthermore, the Zued (South)-Holland province has the highest night LST value in the 2003, 2006 and 2008 years. The result of this research will be helpful tool for urban planners and environmental scientists by providing the critical information about the land surface temperature. * Corresponding author


INTRODUCTION
This Earth system is a complicated cycle with many interconnected components like the Earth's surface and it's interior.Naturally the Earth surface is covered by different land cover types which are mainly distributed based on the environmental and climatically patterns.By adding the rapidly increasing human population and his needs to this balanced system, we will face with many disturbances from the concept of how we change the use of land due to our needs based on its capacity or environmental impact.
Land use is defined as "the arrangements, activities and inputs people undertake in a certain land cover type to produce a change or maintain it" (FAO/UNEP, 1999).Land use is a change over the time and the most important and primary factor in land use changes is the human need.Human population as settlements and especially large urban and industrial areas could significantly modify their sounding environment.Therefore, it is critical to have a detailed information of temporal and spatial land use changes and their rate.Land use should be matched with land capability and at the same time it should respect to the environment, and global climate systems (UNEP, 1996).
The land surface temperature (LST) is the temperature of the skin surface of a land which can be derived from the satellite information or direct measurements in the remote-sensing terminology.LST is the surface radiometric temperature emitted by the land surfaces and observed by a sensor at instant viewing angles (Prata et al., 1995).This is an accurate measurement tool for indicating the energy exchange balance between the atmosphere and the Earth.The degree of land surface temperature (LST) is affected by the surface attributes, which are significantly influenced by the elevation, slope and aspect.However, topography is one of the factors that controls the soil moisture distribution and exerting an additional influence on the land surface temperature.
The Netherlands has an almost flat topography, so it can be a proper case to separate the effect of topographic factors from the land use properties on land surface temperature (LST) behaviour analysis.The combination of the land use analysis result with the mean land surface temperature (LST) can offer useful information to study the urban land use change effects in the Dutch cities.
In this study, we investigate the effects of land use change on the land surface temperature in the Netherlands provinces based on the remote sensing analysis and zonal statistic methods.

DATA COLLECTION
In this research, two different data sources were used for our analysis, which are presented in the Figure 1.The land surface temperature were available from the NASA website by MODIS Terra (temporal interval of 8 days) and the land use data provided from the land use base of the statistics Netherlands (temporal interval of 2 or 3 years).New classes are open agriculture, build-up areas, recreational areas, greenhouse farming, inland waterway, offshore areas and forest.To summarize the values of the LST within each province and land use type and to provide tangible and practical information for decision making, zonal statistic methods were used.The spatial mean LST was then computed for all Dutch provinces and land use types.To achieve this, yearly mean LST raster files of the 2003, 2006 and 2008 years were used.Nearly 45 images for each year.To calculate the average LST of each province, the LST image values were converted to integer values, using the Int.function of the spatial analyst tool in the ArcGIS 10 software.Afterwards, the zonal statistic function was applied to calculate the mean LST.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The Thermal characteristics, conductivity, albedo, surface roughness and heat capacity are among the fundamental factors which affect the amount of the LST of different land uses (Brovkin et al., 2006;Davin & de Noblet-Ducoudré, 2010).The spatial arrangement, area, adjacent land uses and connectivity of different land uses also have impact on the mixed value of LST for each pixel.Reference (van Leeuwen et al., 2011) argued that the LST is regulated by the several parameters e.g.surface conductance, amount of water available for evaporative cooling, wind speed, and surface roughness which regulates the power of sensible and latent heat fluxes.These results are consistent with the study of Weng et al., in 2004(Weng, Lu, & Schubring, 2004).They suggest that the higher biomass/vegetation abundance a land cover has, the lower the land surface temperature is.Furthermore, vegetative land uses possessed a smaller mean value than inland water and build-up area.Forest has the least LST.This result may be explained by the fact that forests strong vegetation can decrease the amount of heat stored in the soil and surface structures through the transpiration (Weng & Lu, 2008).A possible explanation for this is argued by Qian et al., in 2006(Qian, Cui, & Chang, 2006).They discussed that these changes can stem from the discrepancy in solar illumination, atmospheric influences, and soil moisture content in the different study years.The zonal map of the 2006 year is provided.See Figure 1 which shows the average of the mean yearly night LST for each province.The values are the LST original raw values.To convert to Celsius, each value should be multiplied by 0.02 and subtracted from the 273.15 (Zhengming, 2007).The Zued-Holland for all the three years has the largest mean yearly LST.Nord-Holland and Nord-Brabant are among the high LST provinces.The most urbanized parts of the country is Randstad which comprises the major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague has around 5 million inhabitants (de Nijs et al., 2004).It can be noted that in the hot urbanized spots, the amount of mean LST is higher.Reference Zhou & Wang in 2011, (Zhou & Wang, 2011) argued that "apart from land-use change, urbanization with increased human population also contributes to the urban thermal environment change with the rising anthropogenic heat discharge."

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Overview of the datasets

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The up-scaled mean yearly night LST mean to the Dutch provinces scale in 2006 year

Table 1 .
The average of mean yearly night LST for different land use types in the2003, 2006 and 2008 yearsTable1shows that the lowest LST in 2003 year is observed in open agriculture, followed by forest, greenhouse farming, buildup areas, inland waterway and offshore areas.The 2006 year pattern is slightly different, where the lowest LST is found in greenhouse farming, followed by forest, open agriculture, buildup areas, inland waterway and offshore areas.In 2008 year, the lowest LST is for forest followed by greenhouse farming, open agriculture, build-up areas, inland waterway and offshore area.

Table 2
indicates the annual mean value of the LST for different provinces for the 2003, 2006 and 2008 years.Zued-Holland has the highest LST value in the 2003, 2006 and 2008 years.The range of LST for the year 2003 is from 3.39 to 6.39 °C.In the 2006 year, it is ranging from 4.02 to 7.21 °C.The range for 2008 year is from 4.15 to 7.05 °C.The mean LST value for each province can be an appropriate decision-making factor and an environmental warning tool for urban and environmental planners.

Table 2 .
The mean night LST value for each province