Geomatics data acquisition and processing in support of Urban Heat Island studies, case study Bologna

Global warming and changes in Earth’s weather patterns are the main consequences of climate change, and bioclimate discomfort has significant public health problems, especially for the elderly. Normally, the thermal characteristics of urban areas are poor due to a phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI). To study the thermal characteristics of the city of Bologna, mobile temperature measurements took place with a car, along a 75-km transect, while fixed measurements of temperature have done using 15 present weather stations and also placing five thermometers in the city center. Some interpolation models (i.e., global, and local interpolators) are applied to correct the mobile measurements using fixed data. Kriging fulfilled the best result with a correlation coefficient of 0.99. However, there was no meaningful correlation between the corrected temperatures and remote sensing land surface temperature (LST) data (due to lack of nocturnal remote sensing imagery), its correlation with remote sensing normalized difference vegetation index data (NDVI) was 0.69.