Experts fear extremely early season heat waves can be a taste of things like climate change keeps holding. People who live in big cities live in ‘urban’ heat islands” where the heat dissipates more slowly, making everyday life even more difficult.
The International Space Station recorded recent extremes of land surface temperatures for some European cities, including Milan, Paris and Prague, using the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), owned by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). .
The photos provide geospatial information to mitigate the effects of heat waves in the future by planning and managing water resources more efficiently.
Glynn Hulley, of JPL, said: “ECOSTRESS continues to visualize the impact of extreme heat in cities around the world, including the recent heatwaves that broke records in both Europe and the US.”
ECOSTRESS is important to ESA as it helps develop a new Copernicus Sentinel satellite, the Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission.
ESA uses the instrument to simulate the data that will eventually be returned by LSTM, providing systematic measurements of land surface temperature in what they hope will be a game-changer for city planners and farmers.
Both space agencies are working closely together to make the most of the two missions in a synergistic way, including JPL’s Surface Biology and Geology mission.
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Elsewhere in Japan’s capital Tokyo, air temperatures soared above 35 degrees Celsius for five days in a row, marking the worst documented run of warm weather in June since records began in 1875.
In the US, nearly a third of the population had some form of heat advice on June 15.
The cityscapes show land surface temperatures in Milan, Paris and Prague on June 18 in the early afternoon.
By comparison, the broader picture of land surface temperatures across much of Europe below was taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission on June 18, slightly earlier in the day.
Nor is it an academic exercise — rising temperatures could prove fatal, with the aforementioned urban island effect making city dwellers particularly vulnerable.
The images clearly show how hot the surface was in the built-up areas of the cities, but also underline the cooling effect of parks, vegetation and water.
Mr Hulley added: “These data can be used to identify hotspots and vulnerable regions and assess the cooling effects of heat-limiting approaches.”
Benjamin Koetz from ESA added: “The instrument proves to be extremely valuable in helping us develop and prepare for Europe’s LSTM mission, which will provide land surface temperature data with a comparable resolution of 50 m.
“LSTM is planned to be launched by the end of the decade. The main goal of LSTM is to address the needs of European farmers to make agricultural production more sustainable as water shortages increase, thus helping farmers get more ‘crop for the drop’.
“However, it is clear that we are all experiencing more heat waves and LSTM will also be important to help authorities tackle the serious problem of urban heat islands by monitoring the microclimate in the city.”