SAR imagery for urban air quality

This study focuses on the assessment of the potentialities of the Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery to study urban micro-climate and air quality. In urban area, air quality is quite dependent on the air flow drag which is influenced by the aerodynamic roughness parameters of the ground. These parameters are linked to the urban structural features and their typologies. They characterise the evolution of the vertical wind profile with the altitude. To extract structural features, the structure function (also called variogram) is processed on ERS images of the city of Nantes (France). A classification according to the structure function is done that leads to a mapping of the aerodynamic roughness by allotting a roughness parameter to each class.