Studying Surface and Canopy Layer Urban Heat Island at Micro-Scale Using Multi-Sensor Data in Geographic Information Systems

Variations of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect within urban areas cannot be studied in detail using traditional combination of satellite images with thermal infrared (IR) bands and local weather station data due to their limited spatio-temporal scale. In this article, a system has been built to supplement the current infrastructure and enhance the high spatio-temporal scale. The article progresses from initially traversing through the city of Greater Noida to continuous manual data collection on an academic campus and later by automating it with integrated sensors on a microcontroller while achieving the objective of the collection of continuous high spatio-temporal scale data. Geographic information systems (GISs) were used to integrate and visualize these data with land surface temperature (LST) and air temperature data. The system provided the diurnal cycle of urban materials and insights into nighttime UHI at micro-scale. Overall the low-cost sensing technology presented has the potential to monitor citywide UHI.