City-wide impartial situational awareness with regular data acquisition of the city’s thermal performance

The European Directives on Energy Performance of Buildings and the Energy Efficiency, as well as nationally adopted Energy Efficiency Action Plans are the main drivers to monitor and reach legally binding energy efficiency targets by reducing the carbon emission footprint. Energy companies and local and National EU Governments are some of the user groups who have an obligation to comply with the stated regulations. The ThermCERT system allows for a city-wide impartial situational awareness with regular data acquisition of the city’s thermal performance. This allows the ineffective use of energy to be spotted. Conventional data aggregation methods lag in temporal resolution, spatial coverage, are resource intensive to implement, and do not provide the granularity to be able to spot problems on the ground. The output of the ThermCERT system is available through data aggregation and integration from multiple satellite sources. The ThermCERT system represents an opportunity to gain an impartial overview of the built environment by capturing the thermal performance of the whole city at consistent regularity. Additionally, the system enables the analysis of urban data acquisitions to identify problematic areas by a range of parameters derived from satellite observations. A high resolution in situ data acquisition is enabled for thermal inspection of building facades at a closer glance. The ThermCERT system makes use of Sentinels-1 & -2, WorldView, Pleiades, and other very high resolution multispectral satellite missions, in order to derive building parameters for the building stock classification purpose. Landsat 8 and Terra ASTER thermal bands will enable city-wide thermal energy intensity distribution analyses. Satellite navigation is deployed to geo-reference the data sets collected at the ground level for the relevant property objects.