Impact of Impervious Surface Expansion on Urban Thermal Environment Across Tropical Southeast Asian Megacities: Reliable Assessment Through Foundation Model Embeddings

Rapid urbanization in tropical Southeast Asia is transforming pervious land into impervious surfaces, intensifying the surface urban heat island (SUHI) effect and increasing the need for consistent urban thermal monitoring. This study assesses how impervious surface area (ISA) expansion relates to the urban thermal environment across five tropical megacities (Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Ho Chi Minh City). AlphaEarth geospatial foundation model embeddings were used to reduce observation gaps caused by persistent cloud-cover, while MODIS land surface temperature (LST) was used to quantify the thermal response. We compared AlphaEarth classification against conventional Sentinel-2/NDVI approaches and an additional fairer annual Sentinel-2 full-band-plus-index Random Forest baseline, quantified ISA expansion for 2017–2024, and related ISA fraction to dry-season LST at 1 km resolution. Repeated random-holdout tests based on Google Earth Engine samples showed AlphaEarth mean IoU = 0.866 (95% CI: 0.857–0.875), compared with 0.758 (0.749–0.767) for the annual Sentinel-2 full-band-plus-index baseline and 0.686 (0.674–0.698) for the best single-date 5-index baseline. Spatial-block holdout tests gave similar but slightly lower values (AlphaEarth IoU = 0.859; annual Sentinel-2 baseline = 0.747; best single-date baseline = 0.673). Ho Chi Minh City experienced the fastest ISA expansion (+11.0 percentage points; slope = 1.48 pp yr−1, 95% CI: 1.06–1.91), whereas Bangkok reached the highest ISA fraction (65.1%). ISA fraction and LST were consistently and positively associated across cities and years (Pearson r = 0.748–0.900), and mean SUHI intensity during 2017–2024 ranged from 4.01 °C in Bangkok to 8.51 °C in Manila. These results indicate that foundation model embeddings can support cloud-resilient mapping of impervious surface change and thereby improve assessment of tropical urban thermal environments, while also highlighting the need for independent ground-truth validation.