Assessing Urban Canopies 3D Radiative and Energy Budgets with Remote Sensing and DART Model

The quantification of energy budget of big cities has gained a high interest in the recent decade considering it’s link to global change and to the energy nexus. The management of the energy consumption in large cities is following a new revolution as we enter the era of smart cities. But our knowledge of the different components of the energy budget at local scale is still limited. Recently with the development of high spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery and the widespread of 3D databases of the urban canopy, new physically based deterministic approaches to quantify the energy budget components are being developed. In this study, which is part of the H2020 URBANFLUXES project, we show results on the combined use of remote sensing data and 3D radiative and energy budget modeling in urban canopies. The approach relies on the combination of physical modeling and remote sensing data in visible and TIR from LandSat-8 over the city of Heraklion and Basel in Switzerland. The modeling is based on the use of DART (Direct Anisotropic Radiative Transfer) model with a new Energy Budget module DART-EB that takes into consideration the complexity of urban canopies