Context and objectives
According to the European Climate Risk assessment (European Climate Risk Assessment — European Environment Agency, 2024), Europe stands at the forefront of an alarming trend: a rapid escalation in temperatures surpassing that of any other continent, while remaining ill-equipped to address these challenges effectively.
The objective of the EheCatL project is to develop an algorithm, that would allow to estimate air temperature (alongside thermal comfort indices) from visible and near-(thermal-)infrared high-spatial resolution satellite observations via an emulator. Our hypothesis posits that a chaining of three-dimensional simulations of the radiative transfer regime and urban climate dynamics within the city of Brussels can provide insights into the intricate interplay between air temperature (and thermal comfort indices) and how the urban surface processes energy as seen from space-borne sensors.
Project outcome
Expected scientific results
The primary objective of EheCatL is to uncover causal relationships at the local spatial scale between land-surface temperature, obtained from remote sensing observations, and air temperature (and heat stress indicator), within the city of Brussels. These insights can in turn be learned by a Bayesian algorithm allowing to derive accurate estimations of air temperature and thermal comfort indices from satellite-based observations, thereby advancing our understanding of urban microclimates and enhancing our ability to monitor and mitigate the impacts of climate change on urban environments. Although previous efforts towards this direction have been made, our approach that exploits the state-of-the-art Earth observation inversion methods developed within our STEREO-IV SuaBe project will be the first one to deliver air temperature (and thermal comfort indices) at neighbourhood scale (100m), which is a significant advance in comparison with previous approaches delivering air temperature at coarse kilometre spatial resolutions (Benali et al., 2012; Marzban et al., 2018).
Expected products and services
• EheCatL emulator.
• SpaXel algorithm
• Jupyter notebooks
All the above listed products will be made available as open-source repositories.
| Project leader(s): | VITO (Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek) | |||
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| Website: | https://stereoiv-suabe.eu/en | |||