UNDERSTANDING THE THERMAL ENVIRONMENT OF UK CITIES WITH SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING

Speaker: Charlotte Paton, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom, National Centre for Earth Observation, United KingdomWith over 50% of the worlds population already living within urban areas, and that percentage projected to rise, it is with growing importance that we understand the thermal environments of our cities, and how increasing heat not only affects our infrastructure but also significantly impacts our health. Remote sensing of Land surface temperatures (LSTs) provide a way of studying these environments with spatially averaged data at high resolution, across wide areas. However, LST retrievals can be significantly impacted by the auxiliary datasets that are required to provide knowledge of the surface and the atmosphere. Of these, emissivity over urban areas is overwhelmingly neglected, with common methodologies for calculating priors only differentiating between vegetation and soils.