Exploiting Copernicus Core Services for Assessing the Surface Urban Heat Island Intensity

The rise in human activity accompanying urbanization has led to a noticeable increase in temperature in urban areas compared to rural ones, which is commonly known as the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon. UHI can have negative effects on various aspects of urban life, such as environmental conditions, human health, water and energy consumption, and citizens' comfort. Traditionally, UHI is linked to air temperature differences and it requires in-situ climatology data for assessing its intensity, which are seldom available. Hence, a scalable proxy often used in the literature is the socalled surface UHI (SUHI), which is measured by exploiting satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) information. The presented work introduces a novel framework to objectively quantify the SUHI intensity (SUHII) through regression analysis of LST and the density of impervious areas. In particular, this has been implemented in the context of the H2020 CURE (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe) project, whose main goal has been the development of crosscutting city-scale applications for urban resilience that synergistically exploit the Copernicus Core Services. The proposed method was successfully applied to all 10 targeted CURE cities and has the potential to be scaled at the panEuropean level.