Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon.