Spatiotemporal Analysis of Land Surface Temperature in Response to Land Use and Land Cover Changes: A Remote Sensing Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The heat island problem has always been a key concern in urban meteorology, which is of great significance to the sustainable development of cities and people's daily life production. Based on this hot issue, this manuscript uses remote sensing satellite data to study the effects of land use and land cover type on urban surface temperature, which is of great significance to the urban heat island problem. The manuscript is rich in content, introducing the evolution characteristics of urban surface temperature from both temporal and spatial perspectives, and analysing and discussing its influencing factors. But there are still some minor problems, which have been listed below. It is recommended that the manuscript be published after minor revision.

L100: Add the introduction about the economic development and urbanisation of the study area.

Figure 3: Images are not clear and are in rough format and need to be retouched.

L289: There's a problem with the formatting.

Sources of and access to research data should be described.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your review and feedback on our paper. We want to inform you that we have considered each of your points and revised our paper. You can find the details in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of manuscript "Spatiotemporal Analysis of Land Surface Temperature in Response to Land Use and Land Cover Changes: A Remote Sensing Approach" (remotesensing-2828503)

This manuscript tries to elucidate the spatiotemporal variations and alterations of LST in urban areas compared to LULC changes. The study focused on a peripheral urban area of Phnom Penh (Cambodia) undergoing rapid urban development, using Landsat images from 2000 to 2021. The analysis employed an exploratory time-series analysis of LST. These changes in LST did not manifest uniformly but displayed site-specific responses to LULC changes. Since there exist a large number of problems, at least a Major Revision is necessary. Another severe issue is that some latest relevant research has been ignored. In particular, I have the following comments and concerns:

(1) The Abstract and Introduction Section: overall, these two parts are not strong because the authors did not highlight the novelty of this manuscript from an international perspective. As a result, readers cannot find out why this study must be performed in this context. If this study just provided a case study in a particular region, namely, the Phnom Penh in Cambodia, then it lacks enough novelty.

(2) The authors have mentioned that: "the studies conducted time series on LST often focused on descriptive statistics analysis without a visual interpretation". I do not think this statement is correct. Visual interpretations based on GIS and spatial maps are indeed very common in urban climate research.

(3) The innovation should be clearly justified that the manuscript contains sufficient contributions to the new body of knowledge from the international perspective. In particular, the authors need to look further into the latest research in this field. Actually, the literature review is insufficient. I would like to remind that the spatiotemporal analysis of land surface temperature and land use/cover changes were not new in urban climate research (see below for examples).

Exploring the connection between morphological characteristic of built-up areas and surface heat islands based on MSPA. Urban Climate, 2024, 53: 101764

An Evaluation of Different Landscape Design Scenarios to Improve Outdoor Thermal Comfort in Shenzhen. Land. 2024; 13(1):65.

(4) In the study area section, I am missing the descriptions of the urban heat island phenomena in this study area.

(5) Figure 1. Location of the study area: the exact coordinates should be provided in this figure.

(6) The pre-processing procedures of the Landsat remote sensing images have not been clearly introduced.

(7) I am also missing the data of land use and land cover. The authors mentioned that: "We used Google Earth Engine (GEE) to process the images. Images from Google Earth are used to understand the LULC changes". But how? In addition, what are the accuracies of the land use and land cover data?

(8) In the results, the Land Surface Temperature may be occasionally affected by extreme weather events, such as typhoons. How to avoid the influences of these issues?

(9) Can the differences of the Land Surface Temperature be displayed more clearly in details, especially the spatial changes?

(10) Figure 16. Relationship between LST and NDVI and MNDWI: the r-squared values were a bit low.

(11) In future research, I suggest the influences of the spatial pattern of land use should also be taken into account (see the above references).

(12) In the Results and Discussions Sections, how to link the findings and conclusions in this paper with the previous findings and conclusions?

(13) In Section 5. Conclusions and outlook: more quantitative results and conclusions should be provided.

Moderate editing of English language required.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your review and feedback on our paper. We want to inform you that we have considered each of your points and revised our paper. You can find the details in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is titled ‘Spatiotemporal Analysis of Land Surface Temperature in Response to Land Use and Land Cover Changes: A Remote Sensing Approach’. The authors performed a detailed empirical spatiotemporal analysis of Land Surface Temperature (LST) patterns through time series analysis and aimed to understand the relationship of LST with Land Use and Land Cover changes (LULC). The main objectives of this study are: to analyze the statistical and temporal overview of LST distribution and extents, to study the seasonal variability and trends of LST, and to investigate the correlation between LST and various classes of LULC, including vegetation, water and built-up areas. The article is interesting, but requires improvement.

My comments are as follows:

- the introduction is quite well written

- subsection 2.1. needs improvement. There is too little information in the description of the environment. A description of the differences in terrain height, geological structure and river network should be added. The authors do not indicate for what period of time (many years) the air temperature values are given, nor do they provide rainfall values. Moreover, in the part characterizing the climate, the authors provide no references (lines 106-116).

- the authors did not provide the sources of origin of the data used in the study, although they are mentioned in the text, but they are not included in the references, e.g. LULC, Landsat, Google Earth

- I have doubts whether the methodological scheme (fig. 4) was constructed well enough in relation to the actually performed research procedure

- the resulting part requires improvement, the division of the content into individual subsections requires change. The subsections are disproportionate. For example, chapters 3.4 and 3.5 are large, while the rest take up little space

- the discussion needs improvement. I would not divide this part into 2 subsections. I propose to insert a section devoted to the limitations of the research at the beginning of the section and refer to the research of other people.

Technical notes

- fig. 1 requires improvement, general maps lack scale, north direction and geographical coordinates, legend (e.g. region or district border) and data source. In addition, all names used in the article should be marked on the map, e.g. Mekong River, Khbar Ampov District and many others

 -Line 185 subsection 2.7 and 2.7 on line 200 is the same

- Subsection 3.1.1 what does (need to add numbers) mean?

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your review and feedback on our paper. We want to inform you that we have considered each of your points and revised our paper. You can find the details in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

While the paper maintains a clear storyline, I have significant concerns regarding its novelty and approach within the field of LST. It appears that the topic and methodology utilised lack originality and fail to contribute anything new to the discourse. Numerous previously published papers have employed identical approaches and data, rendering this study unremarkable. Consequently, I question the potential for this paper to be accepted by a high-impact journal such as Remote Sensing- MDPI.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your review and feedback on our paper. We want to inform you that we did a major revision of our paper. You can find the details in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for incorporating my previous comments and suggestions. This manuscript can be accepted in present form.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors made improvements in accordance with the reviewer's comments

Reviewer 4 Report

I think the authors did a good job revising the manuscript to highlight the main novelty, which was not clear in the previous version. Right now, it's evident that the primary novelty lies in considering large time series data. Additionally, I'm satisfied with the changes the authors made in the introduction and discussion sections.