Characterization of urban heat island effects over Asian megacities with hourly LST maps derived from Japanese geostationary satellite data

Asian countries are expected to continue economic growth with high rate and urban structure can be transformed dramatically. Urbanization and increase in anthropogenic energy consumption cause urban heat island effect. And, Heat island effect increases cooling cost in summer and induces health problem such as heat stroke. Remotely sensed data can be powerful tool to characterize urban area and measure urban thermal conditions, because it is able to capture spatio-temporal variations in urban environments. Japanese geostationary meteorological satellite, MTSAT which covers east Asia and the western Pacific region from 140 degrees East above the equator was launched in February 2005. MTSAT provides hourly visible and thermal infrared image, and hourly Land Surface Temperature (LST) can be retrieved. Therefore, compared to polar orbiting satellites such as MODIS or AVHRR, MTSAT is expected to characterize urban thermal conditions in much detailed temporal scale. In this study, in order to evaluate thermal conditions over Asian megacities with MTSAT data, we investigated methodology for monitoring urban LST with satellite data and characterize thermal conditions by using hourly LST data. Firstly, LST were retrieved from MTSAT thermal infrared data with split-window algorithm, and it was confirmed that MTSAT is able to capture hourly spatio-temporal changes and detect urban heat island effects. Then, we constructed LST database of Asian megacities and the database was open to public on the WWW (http://eiserv.uee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/MTSAT/LST/index_e.php). Finally, by using developed LST database, characteristics of hourly temperature changes of Asian megacities were compared and categorized. And it is found that these characteristics were depend on urban structure of each city. Near-real time land surface temperature (LST) monitoring system on the WWW. Latest LST images of Asian megacities are displayed on the top page.