Land surface temperature and its misuse in urban policy

Session Title: 

Land surface temperature and its misuse in urban policy

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Urban overheating is an increasing threat due to both global warming and urbanisation. Despite its severe health and wellbeing consequences for billions of urban residents, tailored data for heat monitoring are often missing, particularly in the Global South. As a result, the remote sensing community is increasingly requested to support urban heat adaptation and management via the exploitation of Earth Observation (EO) data. This led to an explosion of studies using satellite-derived land surface temperature (LST) for urban heat assessment, which is readily available globally. LST, however, is a poor surrogate for near-surface air temperature, physiologically relevant human thermal comfort, or direct human heat exposure. Ignoring these limitations can cause problems for the downstream use cases by inflating adaptation benefits, distorting the magnitude and variability of urban heat signals across scales, and ultimately misguiding urban adaptation policy. In a recently submitted perspectives paper, many renowned colleagues argue that satellite-based LST must be treated as a distinct indicator of surface climate, which is relevant to the urban surface energy budget but yet frequently decoupled from human-relevant thermal impacts.
This session invites perspectives and studies with a critical view on LST in urban heat assessment, including its physical limitations, resulting misinterpretation, downstream governance and policy implications, but also best practices and ways forward.