Objectives of the service
HeatScan extends the Urban Green & Liveability Tracker by introducing a dedicated thermal analytics component focused on building-level heat assessment in urban areas.
The objective of this extension is to generate consistent, satellite-derived indicators capable of identifying inefficient buildings by identifying buildings with high thermal heat signatures and mapping relative heat intensity across neighborhoods.
The service addresses the need for large-scale, independent screening of thermal performance patterns to support:
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Energy retrofit prioritization
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Urban heat island mitigation strategies
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Climate adaptation planning
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Evidence-based infrastructure investment decisions
Users and their needs
Target users include municipalities, urban sustainability departments, housing and energy agencies, infrastructure managers and real estate stakeholders seeking objective, city-wide thermal intelligence.
A persistent challenge for cities is the lack of harmonised and comparable thermal performance data at building scale. Existing sources are often limited to isolated audits, voluntary disclosures or sporadic aerial surveys, making systematic prioritization of retrofit measures and resilience investments difficult.
HeatScan addresses this gap by providing:
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Area-wide building-level thermal screening
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Relative heat intensity indicators
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Neighborhood benchmarking
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Repeatable satellite-based monitoring
The extension is validated in collaboration with pilot users and supporting partners:
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Homegrade (Brussels) contributes to user requirement definition and provides access to a 2023 aerial thermography dataset used as a benchmarking reference. Building-level advisory context supports both qualitative and quantitative validation of results, as well as assessment of potential policy applications.
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City of New Bedford (USA) contributes through access to selected municipal energy datasets (where available) and structured feedback from housing and resilience teams. This enables validation of HeatScan outputs in a different regulatory and housing stock context, supporting transferability to the US market.
These collaborations ensure that the generated indicators respond to operational policy needs and are
tested across distinct urban and governance environments.
Service/ system concept
HeatScan integrates satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) measurements with building footprint datasets and spatial aggregation models.
The processing chain includes:
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Automated ingestion of thermal satellite datasets
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Spatial alignment with building geometries
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Aggregation of temperature values at building level
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Generation of comparative heat intensity indicators
Thermal indicators are delivered through geo-enabled interfaces and can be integrated into existing municipal GIS environments.
The architecture ensures scalability across cities and allows repeated monitoring without reliance on in-situ sensor deployment.
Space Added Value
The service relies on Copernicus Sentinel thermal datasets as the primary input source. The systematic coverage, revisit frequency and open-data policy of the Copernicus program enable consistent and repeatable urban thermal analysis at metropolitan scale.
Space data provides synoptic city-wide coverage, temporal consistency, cross-city comparability, costefficient large-scale screening.
Satellite-derived thermal observation makes building-level heat mapping feasible across entire urban areas, overcoming the spatial limitations of ground-based measurements.
Current Status
The HeatScan extension has reached the technical validation phase within the framework of the Urban Green & Liveability Tracker. The thermal processing workflow has been implemented and tested, including automated ingestion of satellite thermal data, spatial aggregation at building level, and generation of relative heat indicators. The integration of the thermal component into the broader Urban Green & Liveability Tracker architecture is ongoing with the scope of enabling combined green infrastructure and heat intelligence analysis within a unified framework.
At present, the technology is still in the testing phase with project partners, and once the project is completed, we will be able to publish definitive results.
Prime Contractor(s)
