The present master thesis discusses the issue of urban heat island in Thessaloniki city, in Greece, using a geospatial approach to the analysis of the phenomenon. The UHI phenomenon is known almost from the beginning of cities’ urbanization. What encourages scientists in a global scale to select it as a study subject is that, the phenomenon becomes more pronounced at these years due to climate change and strong urbanization on a global scale. At the same time, there is a keen interest in the quality of peoples’ life in cities in relation to environmental and energy issues that are directly connected to the environment protection and the conservation of natural resources.
Thessaloniki is a big city for Greece and a reference point for the Balkan space but for this work is the field of the UHI phenomenon research. The study was conducted using air temperatures and applying the Kriging Ordinary interpolation technique in ArcGIS. The results showed that the city faces the phenomenon of particular intensity during the summer months, but also it has a strong presence during the winter months. The chargeable event of the phenomenon as demonstrated by this study is the existing urban density, the height of the buildings and the land uses, as residence, retail market and central city’s function. Thus, through ArcGIS tools, these urban parameters reclassified and "added" to produce an image that depicts the areas that are most likely to experience the effect of the “warm district”. Afterwards, the correlation between the generated image that display potential event UHI in Thessaloniki city and the Kriging Ordinary interpolation temperatures images verify both processes as well. The results are positive as they have high identification rate. Hence, the research illustrated the effect of “thermal areas” in Thessaloniki and found what are the areas within the main city are more likely to develop the UHI phenomenon.
Words Keys: Urban Heat Island, Thessaloniki, Interpolation method, ArcGIS, Urbanization, Building density and height, Urban land uses.
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