Spectral Library of Impervious Urban Materials

The radiative response of impervious urban materials is a highly influential surface property, due to its impacts on the radiation balance of incoming and outgoing long- and short-wave fluxes. Information about the material composition can be determined with data resolved to the wavelength level. Spectral reflectance in the visible- to short-wave infrared (VIS-SWIR) region is widely used in remote sensing-based land cover classification and spectral long-wave infrared (LWIR) emissivity is required for the observation of surface temperatures. The Spectral Library of impervious Urban Materials (SLUM) available from the London Urban Micromet data Archive (LUMA) includes LWIR emissivity spectra of 74 samples of impervious surfaces derived using measurements made by a portable Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectrometer and matching short-wave reflectance spectra observed for each urban sample.

The documentation (pdf) contains photos, meta information for all 74 samples and plots of the short-wave reflactance (300-2500 nm) and long-wave (8-14 um) emissivity spectra.

Data are provided in csv format for short-wave reflectance (LUMA_SLUM_SW.csv) and long-wave emissivity (LUMA_SLUM_LW.csv).

Further details (including integrated broadband values of emissivity and albedo), methods and data analysis are presented in

Kotthaus, S, TEL Smith, MJ Wooster, and CSB Grimmond 2014: Derivation of an urban materials spectral library through emittance and reflectance spectroscopy, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 94, 194–212. doi:10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2014.05.005

Please cite both this site and the paper above if you use this data