Between Gaming and Microclimate Simulations: Temperature Estimation of an Urban Area

With the rising awareness and interest from researchers, local authorities, and industry in the urban heat island effect, thermal remote sensing data is needed as it allows for identification, tracking, or analysis of land surface temperatures. Yet, the accessibility of appropriate thermal data in both the spatial and temporal domain states an inhibiting factor. Whilst thermal satellite data suffers from both low spatial and temporal resolution, airborne imagery might enable adequate resolutions, however, is not acquired without time and cost consumption. One way to overcome this drawback is the generation of synthetic data, which comprises the simulation of surface temperatures. These rather simplified simulations are either quite fast, as desired in gaming applications, however, highly inaccurate, or rather complex, holistic, time-consuming and computationally intensive, like applied in urban microclimate considerations. In this paper, we present an in-between approach towards the estimation of urban surface temperatures that aims to fill this gap between holistic microclimate simulations and climate maps.