Evaluation of the seasonal nighttime lst-air temperature discrepancies and their relation to Local Climate Zones (LCZ) in strasbourg

Abstract

More and more uses and applications are being given to local climate zone (LCZ) maps, which describe the structure of the urban and semi-urban areas. Among others, it is worth highlighting its use in studies of urban heat islands (UHI), sustainability and urban energy balance. Even if the classes are well described in the literature, it is difficult to estimate the general precision of these classification maps because the classification is highly dependent of the urban typology of the city under study. However, LCZ maps represent a reference in the field of urban climatology. This research work aims to make use of these maps to explain the strong influence of LCZ classes on land surface temperature (LST) and, consequently, on air temperature (AT). This kind of investigations will help us to explain the outliers observed in previous work between LST and AT at specific locations in the city of Strasbourg for the period 2012-2019. The LST data were obtained from the thermal infrared data of both ASTER (with 90-m spatial resolution and 16-days temporal resolution) and MODIS satellite (with 1-km spatial resolution and daily revisit period). The reference ATs were obtained from different field measurement provided by a huge network of meteorological stations distributed in the city of Strasbourg. The comparison of measured ATs and remote LSTs provide the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate the relationship between these two parameters both during the day and night, for different land covers and for different times of the year. Finally, UHI maps of Strasbourg for every season are presented.