I would like to do a premise first. Usually the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon is intended as the difference of Air temperature (AT) in the urban areas in respect of surrounding peripheral or rural ones. From airborne/satellite satellite what can be "directly" inferred is the Land Surface Temperature (LST), which is sometimes used as input for modeling to retrieve AT. A term used to remind this difference is the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI), which is related to the difference of LST.

So, in trying to answer to your question I'll refer to satellite data to calculate LST as a proxy to then model AT.

To make a choice (or an integration) between the sensors some parameters to focus are: 1) spectral resolution, 2) spatial resolution and 3) temporal resolution.

1) Concerning the spectral resolution, you should consider that at least one band with wavelength in the Thermal Infra Red range (~8-12micrometers) (TIR) is required. With 1 TIR band (e.g. Landsat family) you can apply single-channel algorithms: needs a reliable calibration, very sensible to the area of application and type of material, very dependent on the removal of the atmospheric effects. With 2 TIR (e.g. MODIS and AVHRR or the old (A)ATSR or the future VIIRS-OLCI) bands you can apply split windows algorithm, mitigating atmospheric effect, but the type of material is still critical (emissivity). With >3 TIR bands (e.g. ASTER or usuallly airborne sensors like the ATLAS or AHS40) you can apply advanced algorithms (like the Temperature Emissivity Separation - TES), but still the atmospheric correction is critical.

2) Concerning the spatial resolution you can go from the 2 daily acquisitions for MODIS/AVHRR/MSG, about every 16 days ASTER/Landsat).

Then depending on the application you have to do a trade off between those 3 elements.

For a big city (e.g. of >20km2), 1km data could be enough for historical analysis and/or monitoring. This could be integrated with few acquisitions at high resolution for a "zonation" of the city and to have a more precise characterization in terms of emissivity.

For medium and small cities 1km become no more enough and it is more difficult to find data suitable for monitoring, while you can more easily found ASTER/Landsat or airborne data for a limited historical study or again zonation.

Hope to be of help.

PS

I suggest you to give a look to the Urban Heat Island and Thermography ESA project (www.urbanheatisland.info) and to Sobrino, J. A., Jiménez-Muñoz, J. C., Sòria, G., Romaguera, M., Guanter, L., Moreno, J., Plaza, A. and Martínez, P., 2008. Land Surface Emissivity Retrieval From Different VNIR and TIR Sensors. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 46, 316 – 327

I would like to do a premise first. Usually the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon is intended as the difference of Air temperature (AT) in the urban areas in respect of surrounding peripheral or rural ones. From airborne/satellite satellite what can be "directly" inferred is the Land Surface Temperature (LST), which is sometimes used as input for modeling to retrieve AT. A term used to remind this difference is the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI), which is related to the difference of LST.

So, in trying to answer to your question I'll refer to satellite data to calculate LST as a proxy to then model AT.

To make a choice (or an integration) between the sensors some parameters to focus are: 1) spectral resolution, 2) spatial resolution and 3) temporal resolution.

1) Concerning the spectral resolution, you should consider that at least one band with wavelength in the Thermal Infra Red range (~8-12micrometers) (TIR) is required. With 1 TIR band (e.g. Landsat family) you can apply single-channel algorithms: needs a reliable calibration, very sensible to the area of application and type of material, very dependent on the removal of the atmospheric effects. With 2 TIR (e.g. MODIS and AVHRR or the old (A)ATSR or the future VIIRS-OLCI) bands you can apply split windows algorithm, mitigating atmospheric effect, but the type of material is still critical (emissivity). With >3 TIR bands (e.g. ASTER or usuallly airborne sensors like the ATLAS or AHS40) you can apply advanced algorithms (like the Temperature Emissivity Separation - TES), but still the atmospheric correction is critical.

2) Concerning the spatial resolution you can go from the 2 daily acquisitions for MODIS/AVHRR/MSG, about every 16 days ASTER/Landsat).

Then depending on the application you have to do a trade off between those 3 elements.

For a big city (e.g. of >20km2), 1km data could be enough for historical analysis and/or monitoring. This could be integrated with few acquisitions at high resolution for a "zonation" of the city and to have a more precise characterization in terms of emissivity.

For medium and small cities 1km become no more enough and it is more difficult to find data suitable for monitoring, while you can more easily found ASTER/Landsat or airborne data for a limited historical study or again zonation.

Hope to be of help.

PS

I suggest you to give a look to the Urban Heat Island and Thermography ESA project (www.urbanheatisland.info) and to Sobrino, J. A., Jiménez-Muñoz, J. C., Sòria, G., Romaguera, M., Guanter, L., Moreno, J., Plaza, A. and Martínez, P., 2008. Land Surface Emissivity Retrieval From Different VNIR and TIR Sensors. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 46, 316 – 327

depends on what u want/objective

Land sat is for historical or time series

I would like to inform you that at Landsat 4 and 5 on band 6, products processed after February 25, 2010 are resampled to 30-meter pixels. Also i havemy dissertation about the difference of land temperature because of Urbanization in metropolitan of Athens. Now, i'm reading about calibration of thermal bands, because the degrees of products are energy and not temperature. So there are some formulas to converting. Finally and according Mr Giulio Ceriola, i can agree with him, that you must choose in what resolution you want to focus. And for sure, to learn which of them gives better results... Keep in touch...

With best regards

Dimosthenis

And for sure don't choose Landsat 7 ETM because it's have a problem after 2003.

I hope to help you a little bit. And of course the answer of Mr Giulio Ceriola was very clearly and full

I reccomend to you this book :Advanced Remote Sensing

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved Author(s) Liang, Shunlin

ISBN: 978-0-12-385954-9