News

Title	UHI and Urban Thermography: Call for Proposal is now open for competitive tender
	2008-06-06
	The Invitation To Tender (ITT) on the DUE, "Urban Heat Islands and Urban Thermography" (UHI), Ref. AO5685 in the ESA Invitations to Tender, has been published today on EMITS with a closing date of 25 July 2008 (EXTENDED TO 8 August 2008).
	The European Space Agency (ESA) hereby invites all interested companies from DUE participating countries to submit a tender for the UHI procurement. If companies are not yet registered as an ESA bidder, they are invited to obtain access to EMITS by completing a questionnaire, which can be found at the indicated URL below, section Registration Request. Densely built cities with a low percentage of green areas are sensitive to heat waves due to surface and air temperatures in the core of the city significantly higher than in the surrounding rural areas. When these high temperatures coincide with low wind speeds and high humidity, the population might be put under thermal stress with dramatic consequences. The main purpose of the Urban Heat Islands and Urban Thermography DUE project is developing, validating and demonstrating a set of services that assimilate satellite remote sensing observations - mainly Thermal InfraRed (TIR) channels - with urban weather stations measurements (temperature, relative humidity and wind speed) into urban meteorological and climate modelling to help decision and policy makers in better preventing the impact of Urban Heat Island (UHI) during heat waves, through appropriate alert systems, and in reducing the risk, through dedicated urban land planning. A second objective of the project is to measure the energy balance of the cities for a better response to the energy efficiency policies. The third and last goal of the project is to study the optimum mission requirements for a dedicated TIR satellite sensor with higher spatial resolution and revisiting time for an adequate provision of Land Surface Temperature retrievals in the metropolitan areas of European cities. The ultimate objective of the project is, through a better understanding of the conditioning factors that drive urban climates, to be in a position to predict and mitigate the spatial and temporal variability of Urban Heat Islands in metropolitan areas. The UHI project will serve a broad range of user communities: (i) Municipalities (Departments of Civil Protection, Health and Urban Planning) (ii) City planners (iii) Environmental, civil protection and health agencies, working at national and sub-national levels (iv) Meteorological offices (Weather Forecast Services) (v) Weather forecasting services of TV channels