Objectives of the service
Many users, including analytics companies, urban planners, agricultural producers, and environmental researchers, lack access to reliable nighttime land surface temperature data at high spatial resolution. Existing products are limited to daytime measurements or offer nighttime 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, highresolution land surface temperature product that seamlessly combines daytime and nighttime observations. With 30metre 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 nighttime processing, data fusion, and superresolution techniques ensure reliable temperature retrievals even in the absence of visible light.
The project focuses on developing, validating, and operationalizing the nighttime temperature processing pipeline and delivering a scalable, marketready service for commercial and public users.
Users and their needs
Targeted User Communities and Needs
- The service targets professional users who rely on accurate land surface temperature (LST) data to deliver operational insights in agriculture, infrastructure monitoring, and urban resilience.
User Communities
- Precision Agriculture
- End users: Agricultural producers and farm operators using temperature insights to optimise irrigation, detect frost risk, and reduce yield losses.
- Customers: Agri-tech companies, smart farming solution providers, irrigation companies, and EO analytics firms integrating LST into decision-support tools.
- Infrastructure Monitoring
- End users: Urban planners, facility managers, and construction engineers managing asset durability and maintenance.
- Customers: Real estate developers, utility companies, insurance providers, and geospatial service providers performing risk and lifecycle assessments.
- Urban Resilience
- End users: City planners, public health authorities, and climate researchers analysing urban heat dynamics.
- Customers: Municipal governments, environmental agencies, and urban climate consultancies.
Key User Needs (Summary)
- Reliable night-time temperature data to capture minimum temperatures and full thermal amplitudes
- Improved detection of frost conditions and urban heat islands
- Higher temporal resolution to monitor rapid temperature changes
- Accurate inputs for diurnal temperature cycle (DTC) and climate models
Project Challenges
- Delivering consistent, high-accuracy night-time LST at sufficient temporal frequency
- Ensuring data reliability for operational and safety-critical use cases
- Seamless integration into existing analytics platforms and workflows
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, and urban heat island maps. The data can be offered as a standalone product or used as an additional input variable, allowing analytics companies to differentiate their offerings and strengthen their competitive position.
Existing alternatives each have limitations. Landsat provides limited night-time coverage with long revisit times, ECOSTRESS offers high resolution, but its coverage can have gaps, and MODIS delivers frequent data at coarse resolution. Other geostationary instruments also lack sufficient spatial detail.
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, and frost formation, making it a clear differentiator in the competitive landscape.
Current Status
The project is in its early phase. Technical feasibility work is ongoing to adapt the existing processing chain to nighttime imagery. In parallel, initial market engagement has started: discussions have been initiated with two smart city municipalities and three analytics companies to validate use cases and assess early interest.
