Analysis of Land Surface Temperature in Urban Areas Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Satellite Observations

Urban areas especially in coastal regions are densely populated and are built with mainly impervious urban materials. The characteristics of these surfaces lead to extreme heat storage and the urban heat island (UHI) in these regions with significant health, economic, and energy consequences. In order to accurately characterizing the dynamics of UHI and its impact on extreme heat events, accurate understanding of the surface energy and water balance in urban regions is crucial. High spatial resolution land surface temperature (LST) at the street level scale, can provide viable information for studying the surface energy balance and also to eventually provide a reliable heat index and other effective indicators that may help to characterize the urban thermal state. In this study, we utilize high spatial and temporal resolution LST products using a combination of Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor and the recently launched Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R) Series for New York City. This study developed high-resolution both temporally and spatially by downscaling the GOES-R product to the resolution of LandSat. Using a series of infrared cameras - two High-res Cameras and one FLIR Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - the quality of the retrieved land surface temperatures by the downscaled GOES-R and Landsat 8 measurements were evaluated against in situ observations that were collected in the Downtown Brooklyn NY area. Preliminary results show that this method is able to downscale GOES-R data to Landsat 8’s spatial resolution with less than 1.5 K error. Additionally, the diurnal variations of temperature for each urban surface type such as asphalt, concrete, grass, and rooftops were investigated using collected ground-based data.