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Analysis of multi-temporal landsat satellite images for monitoring land surface temperature of municipal solid waste disposal sites

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Abstract

This studypresents a remote sensing application of using time series Landsat satellite images for monitoring the Trail Road and Nepean municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal sites in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Currently, the Trail Road landfill is in operation; however, during the 1960s and 1980s, the city relied heavily on the Nepean landfill. More than 400 Landsat satellite images were acquired from the US Geological Survey (USGS) data archive between 1984 and 2011. Atmospheric correction was conducted on the Landsat images in order to derive the landfill sites’ land surface temperature (LST). The findings unveil that the average LST of the landfill was always higher than the immediate surrounding vegetation and air temperature by 4 to 10 °C and 5 to 11.5 °C, respectively. During the summer, higher differences of LST between the landfill and its immediate surrounding vegetation were apparent, while minima were mostly found in fall. Furthermore, there was no significant temperature difference between the Nepean landfill (closed) and the Trail Road landfill (active) from 1984 to 2007. Nevertheless, the LST of the Trail Road landfill was much higher than the Nepean by 15 to 20 °C after 2007. This is mainly due to the construction and dumping activities (which were found to be active within the past few years) associated with the expansion of the Trail Road landfill. The study demonstrates that the use of the Landsat data archive can provide additional and viable information for the aid of MSW disposal site monitoring.

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Notes

  1. 1 http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

  2. 2 http://earthengine.google.org

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Acknowledgements

This paper is an extended version of the paper “Trail Road Landfill Site Monitoring Using Multi-Temporal Landsat Satellite Data” presented at the Geomatics Conference 2010 and ISPRS COM I Symposium, Calgary, Canada. The research was supported by a discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We acknowledge Mr. Peter Filipowich from the city of Ottawa Government, who provided the Nepean and Trail Road landfill monitoring reports. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Wai Yeung Yan, Prathees Mahendrarajah, Ahmed Shaker, Kamil Faisal & Robin Luong

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4L7, Canada

    Prathees Mahendrarajah

  3. Department of Geomatics, College of Environmental Design, King AbdulAziz University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

    Kamil Faisal

  4. Environment Public Authority, Safat, Kuwait

    Mohamed Al-Ahmad

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  1. Wai Yeung Yan
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Correspondence to Wai Yeung Yan.

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Yan, W.Y., Mahendrarajah, P., Shaker, A. et al. Analysis of multi-temporal landsat satellite images for monitoring land surface temperature of municipal solid waste disposal sites. Environ Monit Assess 186, 8161–8173 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-014-3995-z

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