Objectives of the service
Many users, including analytics companies, urban planners, agricultural producers, and environmental researchers, lack access to reliable night time land surface temperature data at high spatial resolution. Existing products are limited to daytime measurements or offer night time data that is too coarse and infrequent to support accurate analysis. As a result, critical processes such as nocturnal heat retention, frost formation, and full daily temperature dynamics remain poorly understood.
This service delivers a consistent, high resolution land surface temperature product that seamlessly combines daytime and night time observations. With 30 metre spatial resolution, daily coverage, and high temperature accuracy it enables users to monitor temperature extremes, build complete daily temperature profiles, and improve models for urban heat, agriculture, and environmental monitoring.
The service is powered by the integration of thermal infrared data from constellr’s proprietary satellites with publicly available satellite missions. Advanced night time processing, data fusion, and super resolution techniques ensure reliable temperature retrievals even in the absence of visible light.
The project focuses on developing, validating, and operationalizing the night time temperature processing pipeline and delivering a scalable, market ready service for commercial and public users.
Users and their needs
The service targets Earth observation analytics companies, urban climate stakeholders, infrastructure and energy monitoring actors, environmental organisations, and public authorities in Europe and international markets.
The activity currently focuses on users involved in:
- Urban heat island monitoring and climate resilience planning.
- Agriculture and irrigation modelling.
- Maritime and energy trade monitoring.
- Environmental and infrastructure monitoring.
- Night-time energy activity and electrification analysis.
Targeted users include analytics vendors, smart city operators, environmental agencies, infrastructure managers, research organisations, and public institutions.
Current user feedback highlights the following needs:
- Reliable high-resolution night-time land surface temperature data.
- Improved understanding of full diurnal temperature cycles.
- Better monitoring of heat retention and nocturnal cooling.
- Scalable access to operational thermal analytics products.
- More frequent observations than currently available EO alternatives.
- Temperature data that can directly feed operational analytics and decision-support tools.
The main challenge for the project is demonstrating clear operational and commercial value beyond the technical feasibility of night-time LST retrievals. Users expect actionable insights and analytics products rather than raw thermal imagery alone. Additional work is also required to identify strong operational use cases and prospective commercial customers for continuous monitoring applications.
Service/ system concept
Constellr provides reliable nighttime Land Surface Temperature (LST) data to support advanced analytics and decision-making. Using its own satellites, constellr measures how warm or cool the Earth’s surface is during the night.
The satellites send this data to ground systems on Earth, where it is processed, checked for quality, and transformed into standardized datasets. Instead of delivering raw satellite images, constellr distributes this processed temperature data through secure digital interfaces (APIs).
Analytics companies use these interfaces to integrate the data directly into their platforms. By working closely with analytics vendors and end users, constellr ensures the data meets real-world needs and has clear commercial value. Once the service is deployed, users can access high-quality nighttime temperature insights without needing any knowledge of satellite operations or space technology. This enables them to build applications, improve models, and make better decisions based on trusted thermal information.
Space Added Value
The service delivers space-based night-time Land Surface Temperature (LST) data that fills a critical gap in current Earth observation and analytics capabilities. By enabling consistent access to night-time temperature information, it creates measurable economic and operational value for Earth observation and analytics companies and their end users.
This data enables the creation of new night-time analytics products and improves the accuracy of existing models. By complementing daytime observations, night-time LST significantly enhances diurnal temperature cycle models, forecasts, urban heat island assessments, and climate resilience monitoring. The data can be offered as a standalone product or integrated as an additional input variable, allowing analytics companies to differentiate their offerings and strengthen their competitive position.
The service also enables new operational applications in maritime monitoring, energy infrastructure intelligence, environmental monitoring, and smart-city heat resilience planning. Night-time thermal observations support the monitoring of heat retention, temperature dissipation, and energy-related activity during the night, opening opportunities for advanced analytics services and operational decision-support tools.
Existing alternatives each have limitations. Landsat provides limited night-time coverage with long revisit times, ECOSTRESS offers high resolution but with coverage gaps, and MODIS delivers frequent observations at coarse spatial resolution. Other geostationary instruments also lack sufficient spatial detail for operational local-scale monitoring.
By combining 30-meter spatial resolution with a daily night-time revisit frequency from 2027 onward, the service provides more frequent and higher-resolution night-time LST data than existing solutions. This unique combination enables accurate monitoring of night-time phenomena such as heat dissipation, temperature extremes, frost formation, urban heat retention, and maritime activity, making it a clear differentiator in the competitive landscape.
The feasibility study also highlighted strong relevance for future Arctic and climate resilience applications, where continuous thermal monitoring can support environmental intelligence and operational analytics services.
Current Status
