Heat Hazard Maps

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Product Category

• Land use
• Land cover
• Natural Disaster
• Climate Change
• Coast Management 

• Marine
• Earth's Surface Motion

Financial Domains

• Investment management 
• Risk Analysis 
• Insurance management 
• Green finance

User requirements 

UN12: Analysis of potential risks in specific regions.

UN14: Need to screen the feasibility of projects against different hazards criteria.

UN41: Need to monitor the impact of increased temperatures on assets.

Description

financial management sector by identifying areas prone to extreme heat events. These maps utilize satellite imagery to visualize temperature variations and heatwave patterns across a region. By highlighting regions with high heat risk, financial institutions, insurers, and investors can assess potential impacts on various assets, such as real estate, infrastructure, and agricultural holdings. Heat hazard maps are based on Land Surface Temperature (LST) that can be calculated based on the data from thermal sensors on satellites. By comparing LST with its historical record, it is possible to generate heat hazard maps that categorize levels ranging from minimal to severe.

Spatial Coverage Target

Asset Level

Data Throughput

Rapid tasking 

Data availability

• High
• High

• Low
• Low

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

Main processing steps

LST can be calculated at a relatively high spatial resolution (30 m) through equations based on the thermal bands from Landsat. Otherwise, there are some publicly available LST data from Copernicus at lower spatial resolution (5 km), but with very high temporal frequency (~ 1 hour). Afterwards, by comparing LST data with its historical record, it is possible to generate heat hazard maps.

Input data sources

Optical:  Landsat series

Radar:  N.A

Satellite-based products: LST from Copernicus Land Services

Supporting data:  N.A

Accessibility

Landsat series: is freely and publicly available through NASA.

LST is from Copernicus Land Services: is publicly and freely available from Copernicus

Spatial resolution

Landsat series: 30 m

LST is from Copernicus Land Services: ~ 5km

Frequency (Temporal resolution)

Landsat series: 16 days

LST is from Copernicus Land Services: hourly

Latency

Landsat series: ≤ 1 day

LST is from Copernicus Land Services: ~ 4 hours

Geographical scale coverage

Globally

Delivery/ output format

Data type: Raster

File format:  GeoTIFF

Accuracies

Thematic accuracy: 80-90%

Spatial accuracy: 1.5-2 pixels of input data

Constraints and limitations

• The unavailability of higher spatial resolution thermal sensors.
• Low temporal frequency of Landsat data (16 days).
• LST data can be influenced by atmospheric conditions, such as clouds, aerosols, and water vapor. These factors can introduce inaccuracies in temperature measurements, especially in cloudy regions.

User's level of knowledge and skills to extract information and perform further analysis on the EO products.

Skills: Essential

Knowledge: Essential

Similar Products

Name of the Product: Heat Hazard Map over  Great Britain (link)

EO provider: 4 Earth Intelligence

Spatial resolution: 30 m

Temporal coverage: they used Landsat 8 data for summers of 2017, 2018, an 2019.

Geographical scale coverage: Great Britain

Accessibility: contact 4 Earth Intelligence company to discuss eligibility, coverage, and data access.

P29: Heat hazard maps

Download the gap analysis product sheet 

Maturity score

Mean: 2.6

STD: 0.80

Constraints and limitations

·   Cloud presence

·   Land Surface Temperature (LST) data can be influenced by atmospheric conditions, such as clouds, aerosols, and water vapour. These factors can introduce inaccuracies in temperature measurements, especially in cloudy regions.

Relevant user needs

UN12: Analysis of potential risks in specific regions.

UN14: Need to screen the feasibility of projects against different hazard criteria.

UN41: Need to monitor the impact of increased temperatures on assets.

R&D gaps

·   The unavailability of higher spatial resolution thermal sensors with high revisit frequency.

Potential improvements drivers

·  New missions with high spatial and temporal resolutions of the thermal sensor

Utilisation level review

Utilisation score

Mean: 2.80

STD: 0.98

No utilisation

·  Unawareness of the existence of this EO product.

Low utilisation

Medium utilisation

·  Higher cost of using the best available commercial EO product,

·  Unawareness of the existence of the best available commercial EO product with better specifications.

High utilisation

Critical gaps related to relevant user needs

Guideline gap

UN41: Need to monitor the impact of increased temperatures on assets