Assessing how changing local forest cover affects diurnal surface temperature (Gregory Duveiller)

“Assessing how changing local forest cover affects diurnal surface temperature across Europe and Africa” by Gregory Duveiller The Open-Earth Monitor Global Workshop 2026 "Next-Generation EO & GeoAI Built on Openness and Distributed Data" 7-9 October 2026, Barcelona, Spain https://earthmonitor.org/global-workshop-2026/ 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.