Urbanisation is a ubiquitous phenomenon with greater prominence in developing nations. Urban expansion involves land conversions from vegetated moisture-rich to impervious moisture-deficient land surfaces. The urban land transformations alter biophysical parameters in a mode that promotes development of heat islands and degrades environmental health. This study elaborates relationships among various environmental variables using remote sensing dataset to study spatio-temporal footprint of urbanisation in Surat city. Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite data were used in conjugation with geo-spatial techniques to study urbanisation and correlation among various satellite-derived biophysical parameters, [Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, Normalised Difference Built-up Index, Normalised Difference Water Index, Normalised Difference Bareness Index, Modified NDWI and land surface temperature (LST)]. Land use land cover was prepared using hierarchical decision tree classification with an accuracy of 90.4 % (kappa = 0.88) for 1990 and 85 % (kappa = 0.81) for 2009. It was found that the city has expanded over 42.75 km(2) within a decade, and these changes resulted in elevated surface temperatures. For example, transformation from vegetation to built-up has resulted in 5.5 ± 2.6 °C increase in land surface temperature, vegetation to fallow 6.7 ± 3 °C, fallow to built-up is 3.5 ± 2.9 °C and built-up to dense built-up is 5.3 ± 2.8 °C. Directional profiling for LST was done to study spatial patterns of LST in and around Surat city. Emergence of two new LST peaks for 2009 was observed in N-S and NE-SW profiles.