Urban Landsat: Cities from Space

The research presented here is primarily focused on the physical properties of a wide range of urban environments using passive measurement of optical reflectance and thermal emission as well as optical emission of nighttime lights. Comparative analyses of urban reflectance (visible and infrared color) and surface temperature allow us to develop robust criteria for distinguishing urban land cover from non-anthropogenic land covers. These analyses also provide important constraints on the physical properties that control mass and energy fluxes through the urban environment. These constraints are used as inputs to physical models of climatic, hydrologic and ecologic processes.

Each city is linked to a jpeg image of a Landsat visible/IR composite collected by Landsat 5 (pre 1999) or Landsat 7. Most of the image areas are 30x30 km but a few are larger. All images are shown at full resolution (30 m pixel) so the scale (on screen) is equivalent. The jpeg compression causes significant loss of fine detail from the original image. Most of the images are about 200K (~40 seconds via 56K modem). A few are significantly larger.

Analyses of the images are described in Small, C. 2005. Global Analysis of Urban Reflectance, International Journal of Remote Sensing 26(4): p.661-681.