Local public environmental services in England are tackling environmental sustainability through the intelligent use of geographic information by cutting emissions, waste and fuel use. This also leads to cost reductions in delivering services.
The routine updating of municipal maps at 10-year intervals cannot keep pace with modern urban dynamics. The GeoSat project steps into this breach to demonstrate how city planners and managers can use remote sensing to develop new information, incorporate it into existing maps and apply the results across a range of municipal tasks.
Is urban remote sensing really useful to local planners? Does the research community understand which applications, scales and data are most relevant and sought after? These and other questions were addressed in a recent workshop organized by the Geography Department at the Arizona State University.
Urban Metabolism is a conceptual framework for analyzing the flow of energy and materials within cities. This paper discusses evidence that satellite-observed nighttime lights can be used to map and monitor urban metabolism and review the observational requirements for designing an optimized satellite instrument.
If you do not think human activities can create or alter snowfall patterns, then consider the events of Jan. 19, 2011 in Dodge City, Kansas. The National Weather Service documented an unusual weather pattern that caused a very narrow band of snow downwind of Dodge City. The NWS website states that ÛÏthe atmosphere was cold and moist with low clouds and fog preceding the formation of the snow.
NASA launches a month-long DISCOVER-AQ mission to gather air samples from various altitudes in an effort to combat pollution in Maryland.
The proliferation of multistory residential buildings with high occupation densities in the cities of developing countries poses serious challenges to our ability to estimate populations, particularly in squatter settlements where conducting surveys may pose a safety risk to field workers. An innovative method applying both 2D and 3D information derived from digital elevation models obtained by orbital very high resolution images demonstrates that remotely sensed data can provide fast and fairly accurate results that can be updated continuously in the inter-census periods.
H. Taubenböck and T. EschGerman Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), German Aerospace Center (DLR), 82234 Wessling-Oberpfaffenhofen, Germanyhannes.taubenboeck@dlr.de Abstract — Urban monitoring implies multi-temporal observation and measurement of transformations or consistencies within cities. The urban context is highly complex, as cities consist of a large number of people living in close proximity and conditions of relative density and diversity in dynamically … Read More
Paolo Gamba, guest editor for our current Urban Monitoring theme, reports on the 2011 Joint Urban Remote Sensing event held in Munich, Germany.
How accurate are thermal satellite images compared to on-the-ground field measurements when it comes to assessing the urban heat island (UHI) effect in Hong Kong? This research suggests that thermal images can be useful on hot summer nights to evaluate the magnitude and distribution of Hong Kong’s UHI.
