This has been a great year for the Urban Heat Island/Surface Temperature Student Research Campaign. More schools and more students have participated than ever before. I posted a 7 minute "Thank You" video here on https://youtu.be/QPfmAbMrwE4 Youtube. Urban Heat Island is a growing issue worldwide. More than 50% of the population of the world lives in urban areas. Much of this growth has been in developing. I went to research presentations about UHI at the American Association of Geography (AAG) meeting in New Orleans this week. There were many talks about UHI and using satellite imagery to observe it. Student land surface temperature observations made by you can help in studying UHI. The figure below shows one researchers estimation of the impact of the Urban Heat Island effect on aresa of the world (Cui et al. 2016).
I will use some terminology that my GLOBE friend Markus Eugster from Switzerland uses. The warmth of spring has started to be felt in the Northern Hemisphere although in the eastern United States the warmth has been slow to come.
You can see in the maps below that the temperatures in much of the Northern Hemisphere was much colder on March 1, 2018 than on March 26, 2018. On the image, the student data is overlaid with surface temperature derived from the MODIS sensor. You can see the warmer temperatures in the United States, Croatia, Saudia Arabia and Thailand. I think it is really impressive.
March 1, 2018
March 26, 2018
Below is a close-up of Croaita. You can see how closely the satellite imagery and the in situ (that's a fancy word for observations taken by hand) observations match.
Lastly, we can see the urban heat island effect around Toledo just looking at the difference in temperature between within Toledo (urban) with higher temperatures shown in yellow and outside Toledo (rural) with cooler temperatures represented by blue.
Schools that entered data during March are - with a total of 818 observations.
