Cool Cities Lab
Home
Help
Contact us
Data and MethodsPrivacy PolicyCookie PreferencesTerms of Service

©️World Resources Institute 2026

Back to Data and Methods

Image Preview

Land Surface Temperature

Overview

This layer shows land surface temperature (LST) for each pixel from the Landsat surface temperature band as retrieved from Google Earth Engine. The layer reports the 95th percentile LST value calculated from a mosaic of cloud masked Landsat images from years 2023-2025 selected from the 90-day window centred on the median hottest date as determined from ERA5 DAILY.

Function
To identify potential areas of high heat risk.
Source
WRI
Data sources
Landsat
Spatial resolution
30 meter
Spatial coverage
Global
Temporal resolution
16 days
Temporal coverage
2013-present
Cautions
 Land surface temperature, while widely available, is a poor proxy for the heat hazard experienced by people. If available for the full area of interest at sufficient resolution, consider using a heat hazard metric more directly correlated with human health, such as air temperature or universal thermal climate index. Note also that we display extreme values: the highest (95th percentile) values taken from each location's hottest season.
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/