Urban Heat Island and Urban Thermography project DESIREX 2008

In the framework of its Earth Observation Programmes, the European Space Agency (ESA) carries out a number of ground-based and airborne campaigns to support geophysical algorithm development, calibration/validation and the simulation of future spaceborne earth observation missions for applications development related to land, oceans and atmosphere. This paper deals with the development and data acquisition aspects of the ESA experimental campaign DESIREX 2008 (Dual-use European Security IR Experiment 2008) carried out in support of the proposed activities for the Reorientation of the Fuegosat Consolidation Phase of the Earth Watch Programme. The DESIREX 2008 campaign combined the collection of airborne hyper-spectral, spaceborne and in-situ measurements to generate spectrally, geometrically and radiometrically representative dataset to address observational requirements for Urban Heat Islands (UHI) and Urban Thermography (UT) monitoring and assessment of an operational system. The period June-July 2008 was chosen to optimise good weather conditions in Madrid (Spain), where the campaign was carried out.