LONDON BUILDINGS

ENERGY!

PATTERNS &
FORM

COMING SOON

LONDON FROM SPACE

LONDON FROM THE AIR, AND 

LONDON FROM A HIGH VANTAGE POINT

 
London and many other English cities can be seen as bright thermal `footprints' in this night-time image of England, France and the English Channel. In the false-colour representation used here, temperature increases through blue and yellow to orange over a temperature range of 278-288K (= 5 to 15 degrees Celcius).

London Airport reservoirs appear as orange hot spots as they remain hotter than the surrounding land that has cooled quicker since the sun has gone down; the water bodies have a higher thermal inertia than the land due to the higher specific heat capacity.

The image was from captured by the European Space Agency's (ESA) ERS-1 satellite at an altitude of around 777 km. (This is a 12 micron night-time image acquired on 7th September 1991; the area covered is 512 x 512 square km.)

More details on ESA's Observing the Earth program can be found here.

 
These side-by-side heat maps, produced from data measured by AATSR's thermal channels, highlight the sharp increases in UK land temperatures. The map on the left was acquired on 15 July 2006 and shows cooler temperatures, while the map on the right shows warmer temperatures on 18 July 2006. The scale ranges from yellow to red, with red indicating higher temperatures. 

Source for image and text = European Space Agency

The full potential of the information that was captured is still in the process of being realized. More about this is presented on the practical applications web page. Presented below are a few extracts from some of the many original thermal images captured.

St Paul's Cathedral

 
 
LONDON FROM A HIGH VANTAGE POINT
 

The City, St Paul's, Canary Wharf & The Thames, from Centre-Point Tower, by Ray Lowe

The owners of Centre Point were kind enough to allow access to their top floor, so we could experiment and try and get a few interesting aerial shots with the borrowed thermal camera.

Although it was a fairly hazy and very windy December 28th some interesting thermal shots were captured, in that they help convey the message about energy efficiency and insulation by showing the hot and cold spots of some of London's roofscape. Some thumbnails (remember to hit the back button to get back to this web page if you want to see the larger originals) are presented below. 

As an experiment however, this revealed the limitations of using such a camera as a potential artistic tool, as one might use an ordinary camera. The thermacam has a fixed field of view and aperture. Although it has an amazing ability to reveal scenes in their thermal perspective, with the thermal camera used, this is limited to a fixed field of view at 40 degrees of horizontal arc, a fixed resolution of 640x480 pixels and a fixed menu of alternative 'false-colour' spectrums to present the heat images captured.
 
  

Here is an intriguing thermal image of BT Tower. Why does it look the way that it does? Part of the reason is that the tower is cylindrical. It was also a very windy, cold and hazy day. For the rest of the explanation, please feel free to study the 'Thermal Imaging Primer' on the 'About The Technology' page.

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