The ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) aims to realize the full potential of the long-term global Earth Observation archives that ESA has established over the past 30 years, as a significant and timely contribution to the ECV databases required by UNFCCC.

The goal of the CCI Land Surface Temperature Project (LST_cci) is to provide an accurate view of temperatures across land surfaces globally over the past 20 to 25 years and meet the requirements of Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) for climate applications by developing techniques to merge archived data from a variety of satellites into a combined long-term satellite record for climate.

Within LST_cci, RUB performs one of the User Case Studies (UCS) with the purpose to provide feedback to the Science Team about the performance of the LST_cci products. RUB’s UCS is concerned with the temporal behavior of Surface Urban Heat Islands across the globe using satellite data from ATSR-2, -3 and MODIS.