Urban Thermal Radiation Simulation Using High Resolution Digital Surface Models and Multispectral Images

Urban thermal environment plays a crucial part in urban disaster prevention, urban planning, and environmental protection. Urban shadow distributions and land surface components are considered as the most influential factors in the thermal radiation of urban environment. This paper proposes a new method to determine the two factors from high-spatial-resolution digital surface models (DSM) and remote sensing multispectral images respectively, and then urban thermal radiation can be determined by combining temperature measurement on the ground level. Finally, The proposed method is applied to simulate the urban thermal radiation in Beijing as an example, using a three-meter DSM and Landsat 8 images.