Estimation of Land Surface Temperature of Pinder Watershed, Central Himalaya Using Landsat-7 Data

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is one of the primary indices in the mechanics of land-surface processes on global and regional scales. It is the aggregation of the product of the terrain atmospheric interactions and energy fluctuation between the atmosphere and the terrain surface. Determining precisely the thermodynamics of LST is critical in huge range of applications such as climatology, hydrology, agriculture and biogeochemical and in change detection studies. The rapid advances in thermal remote sensing techniques have led to the measurement of LST from space borne applications in determining the impact of surface temperature dynamics at global, regional and local levels. The fundamental objective of the present paper is demonstration application of Remote Sensing techniques in determining of LST using one of the Great Himalaya watersheds of the Kumaun Himalaya, viz Pinder Watershed. For determining of the spatial distribution characteristics of surface temperature of Pinder watershed, the Landsat TM (Thermal Band) data of years 1990, 1999 and 2011 at a resolution of 30m are used. Mono-window and single channel algorithm were used to estimate land surface temperature for Pinder Watershed, and a correlation was made between LST, NDVI and Landuse/Land Cover (LU/LC) to analyses about land surface temperature and its distribution under different terrain categories by the application of GI Science techniques. The results reveals that the maximum, minimum and average temperature have increased from 21.65℃, -17.50℃, 2.07℃ to 26.07℃, -9.03℃, 8.52℃ respectively from 1990 to 2011.