Estimating high-resolution albedo for urban applications
- David Fork
- Elizabeth J. Wesley
- Salil Banerjee
- Vishal Batchu
- Aniruddh Chennapragada
- Kevin Crossan
- Bryce Cronkite-Ratcliff
- Ellie Delich
- Tristan Goulden
- Mansi Kansal
- Jonas Kemp
- Eric Mackres
- Yael Mayer
- Rebecca Milman
- John C. Platt
- Shruthi Prabhakara
- Gautam Prasad
- Shravya Shetty
- Charlotte Stanton
- Wayne Sun
- Lucy R. Hutyra
2026-06-22
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.