Abstract

During the last decades, the land-use structure in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta has changed due to industrialization. Recently a trend of built-in areas increases while vegetable areas have a decrease trend.These make land surface temperature (LST) increase in urban and industrial areas. The paper focuses on exploiting MODIS data products to determine a spatial pattern of LST changes in dry seasons from 2000 to 2015. For each pixel, a temporal trend of LST changes has been estimated by a linear regression. The results indicate that generally LST in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta increase at an average rate of +0.10 C per year in dry season during the observed period. Approximate 52% of the total area has light variable or a temporal trend of LST changes equaling nearly zero.The central areas have an increased trend of the LST changes, to be indicative of becom-ing warmer, occupying about 43% of the total area. Inversely, the maritime provinces have few areas becoming cooler, shown by negative trends of the LST changes, occupying approximately 5%. The result is expected to contribute usefully studies and understandings of drought and salinity intrusion-in this region.