Paris Land Surface Temperature

With air temperatures in excess of 10 degree C above the average for the time of year in parts of Europe, the United States and Asia, June 2022 has gone down as a record breaker. The fear is that these extreme early-season heatwaves are a taste of what could soon be the norm as climate change continues to take hold. For those in cities, the heat dissipates slower creating 'urban heat islands', which make everyday life even more of a struggle.

An instrument, carried on the International Space Station, has captured the recent land-surface temperature extremes for some European cities, including Milan, Paris and Prague. While these images offer little direct consolation for those suffering the burden of heat, they are helping by providing geospatial information to mitigate effects of heatwaves in the future through planning and managing water resources more efficiently.

For ESA, this particular instrument, which is called ECOSTRESS and owned by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is important because it is helping in the development of a new Copernicus Sentinel satellite: the Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission. ... Read More