using landsat 8 to evaluate heat
Saturday, July 20, 2019. The hottest day of the hottest month ever recorded in New York (and the world), with temperatures reaching 95ยบF. The United States Geological Survey recorded the scorching heat in New York City with a satellite image, allowing the general discomfort of New Yorkers to be a subject of spatial analysis. We made ourselves familiar with LandSat data and accessed its images for surface temperature. After reassigning the cell size for this raster image, a step required in order to make it congruent to our social vulnerability map, we reclassified the cells: a score of 1 for the coolest cells and a score of 10 for the hottest. This raster map shows the different effects of heat on the built environment: places such as John F. Kennedy International Airport concentrate surface temperature, while green spaces mitigate it. This is the case of Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. There is a significant limitation to working with the LandSat8 image we employed: it constitutes a snapshot of urban heat in a very particular moment in this case, an unmerciful summer. In consequence, we cannot follow the patterns of urban heat during different times of the day, nor can we see the effects of urban heat islands during other days of the week.
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