ABSTRACT Urban expansion in Dilla Town, Ethiopia, has progressively reshaped local thermal conditions by replacing vegetation and cropland with impervious built‐up surfaces. This study analyses how three decades of land‐use/land‐cover (LULC) change have modified land surface temperature (LST) and projects future thermal patterns. Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI imagery from 2001, 2011, and 2021 was classified into five LULC classes using a Support Vector Machine (overall accuracy 90.4–92.4%; κ = 0.88–0.90). LST was retrieved from thermal bands via a single‐channel algorithm and related to NDVI and the Normalized Difference Built‐up Index (NDBI). Between 2001 and 2021, the built‐up area increased by ∼5.34 × 10 6 m 2 , while mixed forest and cropland decreased by 3.14 × 10 6 m 2 and 2.92 × 10 6 m 2 , respectively. Over the same period, LST rose from 23.17°C to 33.80°C to 24.42°C to 40.18°C, and mean LST increased from 27.47°C to 30.61°C. In 2021, LST showed a strong positive correlation with NDBI (R 2 ≈ 0.64) and a negative correlation with NDVI (R 2 ≈ 0.36). A CA–Markov model, validated with a Kappa Index of Agreement of up to 0.95, predicts continued urban expansion and a marked shift toward hotter LST classes by 2031, emphasizing the need for greening, wetland conservation, and heat‐aware urban planning.
Kebede et al. (Wed,) studied this question.