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Remote Sensing of Urban Thermal Landscape Characteristics and Their Affects on Local and Regional Meteorology and Air Quality: An Overview of NASA EOS-IDS Project AtlantaAs an entity, the city is a manifestation of human "management" of the land. The act of city-building, however, drastically alters the biophysical environment, which ultimately, impacts local and regional land-atmosphere energy exchange processes. Because of the complexity of both the urban landscape and the attendant energy fluxes that result from urbanization, remote sensing offers the only real way to synoptically quantify these processes. One of the more important land-atmosphere fluxes that occurs over cities relates to the way that thermal energy is partitioned across the heterogeneous urban landscape. The individual land cover and surface material types that comprise the city, such as pavements and buildings, each have their own thermal energy regimes. As the collective urban landscape, the individual thermal energy responses from specific surfaces come together to form the urban heat island phenomena, which prevails as a dome of elevated air temperatures over cities. Although the urban heat island has been known to exist for well over 150 years, it is not understood how differences in thermal energy responses for land covers across the city interact to produce this phenomenon, or how the variability in thermal energy responses from different surface types drive its development. Additionally, it can be hypothesized that as cities grow in size through time, so do their urban heat islands. The interrelationships between urban sprawl and the respective growth of the urban heat island, however, have not been investigated. Moreover, little is known of the consequential effects of urban growth, land cover change, and the urban heat island as they impact local and regional meteorology and air quality.
Document ID
20000012865
Acquisition Source
Marshall Space Flight Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Quattrochi, Dale A.
(NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL United States)
Luvall, Jeffrey C.
(NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL United States)
Estes, Maurice G., Jr.
(NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL United States)
Date Acquired
August 19, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 1999
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Meeting Information
Meeting: 1999 National Remote Sensing Application Conference
Location: Auburn, AL
Country: United States
Start Date: November 15, 1999
End Date: November 17, 1999
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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