2026-10-08, 14:45–15:00 (Europe/Madrid), Rooms 12+14
Increasing forest cover is generally perceived positively. Potentially, more trees can capture more carbon, along with bringing other beneficial ecosystem services if they become sustainable ecosystems. However, this also changes some key properties of the surface of the Earth (e.g. albedo, latent heat flux, etc) that can affect the local climate through biophysical mechanisms, notably by changing the local land surface temperature (LST). This aspect is still largely ignored by policy-makers, in part because they are difficult to model given they depend much on local context which is spatio-temporally variable. As demonstrated by several studies, satellite remote sensing has a role to play here. In this presentation we will illustrate how, within a dedicated OEMC use case, we adapted an established methodology to retrieve the local effect of forest cover change on LST and made the processing pipeline openly available and reproducible. We applied it for the first time on geostationary satellite data with a 15 minute revisit frequency over Europe and Africa to generate estimations of the change of LST along the entire daily cycle. This was done in collaboration with the European Commission Joint Research Centre on their BDAP platform opening the possibility to expand results within their EU Forest Observatory. In parallel work we also explored how the spatial heterogeneity of tree cover could also have an effect on LST and further into cloud formation across Africa.
More information on this OEMC use case can be found in the GEO knowledge hub under the following link: https://gkhub.earthobservations.org/packages/f7dpr-d1b98
Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure (Grant agreement ID: 101059548), Other
Gregory Duveiller holds a PhD in agronomical science and biological engineering from the Université catholique of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. After his PhD, he spent 10 years working at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), in Ispra, Italy. He has specialized in developing methods to combine different satellite remote sensing data streams to better monitor and understand land processes, including crop yield monitoring, land cover change and land-atmosphere interactions. Since 2021 he is a project group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. His main research aims at improving our understanding of the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the Earth System by using data-driven yet process-based thinking applied to satellite Earth Observation data. A key focus is on exploring the complexity and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems, and how their specific functional properties affect land-atmosphere interactions. Topics explored under this umbrella include: (i) improving estimations of carbon, water and energy fluxes; (ii) studying the role of biodiversity (specifically functional diversity) to improve ecosystem resilience; (iii) exploring the biophysical effects of land use and land management on climate.