**3. Application for surface cover and land surface temperature**

This chapter examines the exploitation of EO data for monitoring the urban climate, with particular focus on satellite data. The mapping of the urban surface and its characteristics, using spectral unmixing is examined in the first part. A method adjusted for urban studies is proposed which accounts for the non-linear mixture of spectral radiances in the urban canyon. The second part focuses on thermal EO data. To capture the intra-urban variations of temperature, EO data of high spatial and temporal resolution are necessary, but no current of forthcoming satellite provides them. Moreover, only one from the series of Sentinel satellites carries a thermal sensor of low spatial resolution. To overcome the limitations of the resolution trade-off, a synergistic methodology between high resolution optical and low resolution thermal satellite measurements with ultimate goal daily local-scale land surface temperature estimates.

generated from Landsat Ecosystem Disturbance Adaptive Processing System (LEDAPS) dis-

Earth Observation for Urban Climate Monitoring: Surface Cover and Land Surface Temperature

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Daily MODIS Level 1B (MOD021) data from both Terra and Aqua satellites for a period between April 1, 2013 and April 30, 2013 were acquired. The daily MODIS water vapor product (MOD05) was also used to provide ancillary atmospheric information on water vapor and

The sub-pixel land cover information was estimated using spectral unmixing with a neural network, trained using endmember spectra collected from the image and synthetic spectra [21]. The methodology applied to produce the synthetic spectra and to estimate the surface

The urban surface is assumed to be composed of four land cover types: built-up surface, vegetation, non-urban bare surfaces, and water bodies. Using Landsat imagery, it is not easy to discriminate between different materials, but rather surface cover types, due to the medium spatial and low spectral resolution [22]. Thus, a redundant two-level hierarchy is assumed, as shown in **Figure 5**, including the four main surface cover types in the first level and a more

detailed one in the second level, serving the endmembers collection.

tributed by the U.S. Geological Survey [20].

**Figure 4.** Urban Atlas land use polygons of the test site, the city of Heraklion, Greece.

**3.2. Urban surface cover mapping**

cover fractions is briefly described below.

cloud cover.
