Quantifying the Heat Stored in Urban Environments Using Remote Sensing Technology

Estimating the urban storage heat flux is one of the long standing unresolved issues in Earth and Environmental sciences. It is hypothesized to be the dominant term in the urban surface energy budget; the heterogeneity of the urban landcover and lack of observational technique have thus far proved to be the foremost impediments in quantifying the heat stored in cities. With more than half of the world’s current population living in cities, it is of utmost importance to close the urban surface energy budget, which influences energy use, local to global climate, human health and security. The primary motivation of this research is to quantify the contribution of storage heat flux to the urban surface energy budget. To accomplish this goal, remote sensing data will be integrated with landcover and ground based measurements. The recently released NOAA GOES-16 satellite will be used for this analysis. The GOES-16 satellite has a spatial resolution of 2 km in the infrared bands and more importantly has a temporal resolution of 5 minutes. This enables the use of satellite-based remote sensing data at meteorologically-relevant temporal scales. The satellite data will be coupled with high resolution landcover and land use information to estimate the storage flux and will be validated using ground-based measurements. New York City (NYC) is currently used as a test case for the study. Our preliminary analysis shows that the GOES-16 satellite data is reasonably correlated with ground-based sensors. Surface temperatures over 45˚C are observed during the summer months in parts of NYC. Additionally, the satellite images reproduce the spatial variability reasonably well. In the next phase, satellite images will be downscaled to higher resolution and integrated with a high-resolution landcover and land use database to estimate the storage heat flux.