This study focuses on examining the historical trends of the surface urban heat island (SUHI) in relation to land use/cover (LULC) changes in Jeddah City from 2013 to 2022 using Landsat data. To achieve this, various parameters were analyzed, including LULC changes, normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and LST. During this timeframe, Jeddah City underwent a comprehensive development initiative aimed at demolishing informal and illegal settlements and improving the overall quality of life, aligning with the Kingdom’s 2030 vision. This provides an interesting opportunity to investigate the effect of these urban transformations on the variation, presence, and intensity of SUHIs. Based on the results, a significant positive correlation between the density of built-up and LST was found, while a negative relationship was noticed between NDVI and LST for all time points. Furthermore, a remarkable observation in 2022 was the complete absence of the SUHI phenomenon following the removal of old informal settlements from the city. The outcomes of this study highlight the impact of urban development and hold the potential to uncover environmental imbalances and contribute to the development of strategies to mitigate the negative effects of LULC changes, thereby restraining the rise in LST.

Due to the lack of coverage of IGS in Africa, especially over North Africa, and the construction revolution of infrastructure in Egypt, a geodetic CORS stations network was established in 2012. These CORS stations are operated by the Egyptian Surveying Authority (Egy. SA) and cover the whole of Egypt. The paper presents a fully developed regional ionosphere model (RIM) depending on the Egyptian CORS stations. The new model and the PPP solution were obtained using Bernese GNSS V. 5.2 software. An observation data series of eight days (DOY 201–208)/2019 was used in this study. Eighteen stations were used to develop the RIM model for each day; fifteen stations were used to validate the new RIM model. A static SF-PPP solution was obtained using the CODE-GIM and RIM models. Comparing the outcomes to the reference network solution, based on the recently developed RIM model, the solution showed a mean error of 0.06 m in the East direction, 0.13 m in the North direction, and 0.21 m in the height direction. In the East, North, and height directions, this solution improves the SF-PPP result achieved by the Global Ionosphere Maps (CODE-GIM) model by 60%, 68%, and 77%, respectively.