Simulating and Validating CHIME and LSTM Data for Urban Material Characterization

The aim of this research is to investigate potential uses of the CHIME and LSTM missions for urban climate research. Therefore, this paper initially introduces two methodologies to obtain synthetic images for these future ESA missions starting from existing airborne or spaceborne data sets. Subsequently, this work shows to what extent these synthetic CHIME and LSTM data sets can be used to characterize urban materials and their thermal properties, with the final aim of better management of the urban heat island effect. Spectral unmixing using database spectra of urban materials or image-driven endmembers is applied to synthetic data for Athens, Greece, obtained from ESA’s THERMOPOLIS-2009 airborne campaign or the PRISMA mission, together with ECOSTRESS data sets. Experimental results on two neighborhoods of the city of Athens show that these synthetic data have the potential to extract urban material maps, but the limitations suffered by these data suggest that using image-driven endmembers is the most effective choice towards more accurate results.