# Urban Heat Island (UHI) intensity modelling, Jan. 2020

The raster dataset of urban heat island modelling shows the fine-scale (100m pixel size) temperature differences (in degrees Celsius °C) across 100 European cities, depending on the land use, soil sealing, anthropogenic heat flux, vegetation index and climatic variables such as wind speed and incoming solar radiation.

In the framework of the Copernicus European Health contract for the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), VITO provided 100m resolution hourly temperature data (2008-2017) for 100 European cities, based on simulations with the urban climate model UrbClim (De Ridder et al., 2015). As the cities vary in size, so do the model domains. They have been defined with the intention to have a more or less constant ratio of urban vs. non-urban pixels (as defined in the CORINE land use map), with a maximum of 400 by 400 pixels (due to computational restraints). From this data set, the average urban heat island intensity is mapped for the summer season (JJA), which is the standard way of working in the scientific literature (e.g. Dosio, 2016). The UHI is calculated by subtracting the rural (non-water) spatial P10 temperature value from the average temperature map. 

The 100 European cities for the urban simulations were selected based on user requirements within the health community.https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/geonetwork/srv/api/records/45b703bb-d4f3-4eaa-8b73-13fde2041f01


[More information](https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv/api/records/45b703bb-d4f3-4eaa-8b73-13fde2041f01)
    