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Urban public open spaces are an important part of the urban environment, creating the framework for public life. The transformation of open space into successful public places is crucial in this regard. In the context of target-driven performance it is essential to identify the value of successful public open places, along with characteristics that define them. This research evaluated three case studies in Belgium (Namur, Wavre and La Louviere) which successfully transformed spaces into lively public open places. The transformation was captured by means of before-and-after imagery and analyses, and evaluated in terms of space-usage prior to, and after redesign, along with the experience and added value that the redesign brought to the area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model is coupled to a remote-sensing-based SVAT that accounts for soil and vegetation in order to study the feedback effects between surface state and spatial variability in fluxes, through the induction of spatial variability in the lower atmosphere. As such, this study focuses on sensible heat flux exchange. The simulations indicated that changes are introduced to the flux distributions mainly at higher surface temperatures. A scale-dependent method is presented to account for feedback effects. This showed the most significant correlation between surface and air temperature at scales from 500 to 1000 m and modulated the spatial variance of sensible heat flux. This suggests that feedback effects act to limit the spatial variability in fluxes, and ignoring them will cause the largest errors at the extremes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To advance our understanding of land-atmosphere exchanges of water, energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) in space and time over heterogeneous land surfaces, two intensive field campaigns were carried out at the Barrax agricultural test site in Spain during 12-21 July 2004 (SPARC 2004) and 8-14 July 2005 (SEN2FLEX 2005) involving multiple field, satellite and airborne instruments for characterizing the state of the atmosphere, the vegetation and the soil from the visible to the microwave range of the spectrum. Part of the experimental area is a core site of area 25 km2, within which numerous crops are grown, on both irrigated and dry land, alongside fields of bare soil. The campaigns were carried out in the framework of the Earth Observation Envelope Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) with the aim of supporting geophysical algorithm development, calibration/validation and the simulation of future spaceborne Earth Observation missions. Both campaigns were also contributions to the EU 6FP EAGLE Project. The emphasis of this contribution is on the in situ measurements of land-atmosphere exchanges of water, energy and CO2 as well as the thermal dynamic states of the atmosphere, the soil and the vegetation. Preliminary analysis and interpretation of the measurements are presented. These two data sets are open to the scientific community for collaborative investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]