Evaluating tourism urban expansion, heat Island dynamics, and economic sustainability using Landsat and Sentinel satellite data

Rapid urbanization and land use transformation have significantly altered the surface thermal environment in many cities, intensifying the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) effect. This study investigates the SUHI phenomenon in the tourism urban area, by analyzing Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes and their relationship with Land Surface Temperature (LST) using multi-temporal remote sensing data from Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 for the years 2019 And 2024. LULC classification was performed in Google Earth Engine (GEE) using the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The results indicate a notable increase in urban and bare land areas and a sharp vegetation decline in the tourism urban area. According to Sentinel-2 data, urban land expanded from 354.65 km² (7.48%) in 2019 to 271 km² (9.74%) in 2024, while vegetation cover decreased from 805.11 km² (22.11%) to 524.68 km² (14.55%). LST was estimated from the thermal band of Landsat-8, revealing that surface temperatures above 45 °C became dominant in 2024, compared to moderate values in 2019. The analysis of spectral indices (NDVI, NDWI, NDBI, NDBaI, UI, and EBBI) showed that NDBaI and NDBI exhibited the strongest positive correlation with LST (R² = 0.56 And 0.38 in 2019; R² = 0.44 And 0.44 in 2024), while NDVI showed a negative correlation. Boxplots illustrated that urban And bare surfaces consistently recorded the highest LST, whereas vegetated And water-covered areas remained significantly cooler. The overall classification accuracy reached 0.98 (Kappa = 0.96) for Sentinel-2 And 0.74 (Kappa = 0.67) for Landsat-8 in 2019, validating the robustness of the classification approach. The findings emphasise the urgent need for sustainable urban planning, recommending urban greening, surface permeability enhancement, and compact vertical development to mitigate the SUHI effect and its associated environmental and health impacts in the tourism urban area. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.