Summer heat affects cities, fields, and forests differently — but how hot does it actually get on the ground?
To answer this question scientifically for the state of Hesse, thermal satellite composites were created on behalf of the Climate Change and Adaptation Competence Center (FZK) of the Hessian Agency for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG). These composites depict the maximum land surface temperatures across the entire state.
For the period 2019 to 2024, an annual composite with a spatial resolution of 100 m × 100 m was produced, based on data from the Landsat 8 and 9 satellites. Only summer months (June to August) were considered to capture peak thermal conditions. In total, more than 200 Landsat scenes contributed to the final products.
The processing workflow included resampling of the raw Landsat data, brightness temperature and land surface temperature (LST) calculations with emissivity correction, cloud and invalid pixel masking, and the generation of a maximum LST composite in a consistent projection.
The resulting heat maps provide a uniform, statewide dataset for the HLNUG, supporting climate adaptation and urban planning measures across Hesse.