Measuring the temperature of our planets land surfaces
Our researchers are leading a major new project to measure the temperature of the Earth’s land surfaces.
Evidence suggests that long-term trends in surface temperature can be an indicator of climate change. Satellite observations of surface temperature can provide unique and detailed knowledge to better facilitate the understanding of climate change.
The Land Surface Temperature CCI project is part of a coordinated effort to understand surface temperature change across domains within the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI), which confronts the challenging set of satellite-based product requirements for climate.
Accurate knowledge of land surface temperature (LST) plays a key role in describing the physics of land-surface processes at regional and global scales as they combine information on both the surface-atmosphere interactions and energy fluxes within the Earth Climate System. The team from our Department of Physics and Astronomy, who are part of the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) in the UK, will lead a consortium of thirteen international institutions representing the best expertise in land surface temperature. This consortium will work collaboratively on methods to produce the most comprehensive and well characterised global LST data for climate science.
- Press release
- Leicester is the UK’s leading space city, home to the National Space Centre, Space Park Leicester and the University of Leicester’s #outofthisworld space research.