High-resolution calculation of the urban vegetation fraction in the Pearl River Delta from the Sentinel-2 NDVI for urban climate model parameterization

Abstract The European Space Agency recently launched the Sentinel mission to perform terrestrial observations in support of tasks such as monitoring forests, detecting land-cover changes, and managing natural disasters. The resolution of these satellite images can be as high as 10 m depending on the bands. In this study, we used the red and near-infrared bands in 10-m resolution from Sentinel-2 images to calculate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and estimate of the green vegetation fraction in urban areas within the Pearl River Delta region (PRD). We used vegetation coverage obtained from high-resolution Google satellite images as a reference to validate the vegetation estimates derived from the Sentinel-2 images, and found the correlation between the two to be as high as 0.97. As such, information from the Sentinel-2 imagery can supplement the urban canopy parameters (UCPs) derived from the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) level-0 dataset, which is used in urban meteorological models. The rapid retrieval and open-source nature of the methodology supports high-resolution urban climate modeling studies.