Urban Climate Explorer

Built in Shiny, this dashboard aims to provide relevant statistics about Urban Climate for large cities located in WMO Region 6.

The application is based on LSA-SAF SEVIRI LST All Sky dataset.

The administrative boundaries for all the cities used in this study were extracted from OpenStreetMap..

The SUHI daily values are computed for each city using the methodology proposed by Cheval et al. (2022).

The Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) is computed as the difference between the LST values of the urban and, respectively, rural areas, as follows: $$SUHI = LST_U - LST_R$$

• \(LST_U\): urban pixels within the administrative perimeter of an urban area; urban pixels refer to artificial surfaces and associated areas;
• \(LST_R\) non-urban pixels from the buffer extended up to 1/2 * average distance between the city centroid and nodes of the urban administrative perimeter (see figure below); non-urban pixels refer to any land cover category except for urban and water, and they define the rural area used for comparison with the urban pixels.

^{Delimitation of areas for computing LST_U and LST_R for Brașov (Romania) is depicted in the figure above. The rural buffer is drawn at 1/2 * average distance between the city centroid (blue dot) and nodes of the urban administrative perimeter (red dots).}

SUHI Max and SUHI Min were calculated for each day from images corresponding to the time step when the maximum/minimum LST values were recorded. Urban LST mean and Rural LST mean were calculated from the urban/rural pixels extracted from all the images corresponding to each day.

Daily statistics were calculated when at least 38 out of 48 possible values are available each pixel and day. The urban statistics were computed for the cities shown on the below map. The buffers used as rural areas in the SUHI calculation are displayed on the interactive map with red lines.