Estimating high-resolution albedo for urban applications.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 42331799.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-73436-y and PMC identifier 13287749.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Extreme urban heat poses a growing threat to global health, yet a critical cooling intervention-reflective cool roofs-lacks the high-resolution data needed for building-level planning. While satellite-based albedo estimates are globally available, their coarse resolution cannot resolve individual rooftops, limiting targeted climate action. Here we show that fusing freely available 10-m Sentinel-2 imagery with high-resolution satellite data enables urban albedo mapping at 30-cm resolution. This approach combines the radiometric accuracy and global coverage of Sentinel-2 with the spatial detail of commercial imagery to produce actionable urban datasets. Validated against airborne hyperspectral measurements (root mean square error = 0.04), the method resolves albedo at individual building footprints across diverse urban environments. Applied to 12 global cities, our analysis shows that prioritizing large-footprint buildings for cool roof retrofits can reduce citywide temperatures by up to 0.5 °C. This work validates Sentinel-2 for city-scale albedo estimation and enables globally deployable, building-scale rooftop albedo mapping to support targeted cool roof interventions.