RESUMEN
Introduction: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a significant climatic variable and defined as how hot the "surface" of the Earth would feel to the physical touch in a particular location. A spatial analysis of the land surface temperature with respect to different land use/cover changes is vital to evaluate the hydrological processes. Methods: The objective of this paper is to assess the spatial variation of land surface temperature derived from thermal bands of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) by using split window algorithm. Place and Data: The study was conducted in Lalgudi block of Trichy District, Tamil Nadu, India. The block has diverse environment like forest area, barren land, river sand bed, water bodies, dry vegetation, cultivated areas (paddy, sugarcane, banana etc.) and settlements. Landsat 8 satellite images for four selected scenes (December 2014 & January 2015 and December 2017 & January 2018) were used to estimate the LST. Results: The spatial and temporal variation of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LST were estimated. The average NDVI values of cropped fields varied from 0.3 to 0.5 in all the scenes. The maximum value of LST ranging from 35 to 40°C was recorded in river sand bed. Subsequently, semi-urban settlements in the central part of Lalgudi block exhibited higher temperature ranging from 28 – 30°C. The LST of paddy crop and sugarcane was in the range of 23 to 25°C. The water bodies exhibited LST around 20°C. The coconut plantations, forest area and Prosopis juliflora showed LST value ranging from 24 – 29°C. This kind of block level monitoring studies helps in adopting suitable policies to overcome or minimize the problems triggered by increase in land surface temperature.