All over the world, the rapid urbanization process is challenging the sustainable development of our cities. In 2015, the United Nation highlighted in Goal 11 of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) the importance to “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. In order to monitor progress regarding SDG 11, there is a need for proper indicators, representing different aspects of city conditions, obviously including the Land Cover (LC) changes and the urban climate with its most distinct feature, the Urban Heat Island (UHI). One of the aspects of UHI is the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI), which has been investigated through airborne and satellite remote sensing over many years. The purpose of this work is to show the present potential of Google Earth Engine (GEE) to process the huge and continuously increasing free satellite Earth Observation (EO) Big Data for long-term and wide spatio-temporal monitoring of SUHI and its connection with LC changes. A large-scale spatio-temporal procedure was implemented under GEE, also benefiting from the already established Climate Engine (CE) tool to extract the Land Surface Temperature (LST) from Landsat imagery and the simple indicator Detrended Rate Matrix was introduced to globally represent the net effect of LC changes on SUHI. The implemented procedure was successfully applied to six metropolitan areas in the U.S., and a general increasing of SUHI due to urban growth was clearly highlighted. As a matter of fact, GEE indeed allowed us to process more than 6000 Landsat images acquired over the period 1992–2011, performing a long-term and wide spatio-temporal study on SUHI vs. LC change monitoring. The present feasibility of the proposed procedure and the encouraging obtained results, although preliminary and requiring further investigations (calibration problems related to LST determination from Landsat imagery were evidenced), pave the way for a possible global service on SUHI monitoring, able to supply valuable indications to address an increasingly sustainable urban planning of our cities.

Thanks to the advances in computer power, memory storage and the availability of low-cost and high resolution digital cameras, Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is currently one of the most used optical and non-contact techniques for measuring material deformations. A free and open source 2D DIC software, named py2DIC, was developed at the Geodesy and Geomatics Division of the Sapienza University of Rome. Implemented in Python, the software is based on the template matching method and computes the 2D displacements and strains of samples subjected to mechanical loading. In this work, the potentialities of py2DIC were evaluated by processing two different sets of experimental data and comparing the results with other three well known DIC software packages Ncorr, Vic-2D and DICe. Moreover, an accuracy assessment was performed comparing the results with the values independently measured by a strain gauge fixed on one of the samples. The results demonstrate the possibility of successfully characterizing the deformation mechanism of the investigated materials, highlighting the pros and cons of each software package.

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, launched in December 2022, aims to address the crucial environmental goal of water monitoring to support preparedness for extreme events and facilitate adaptation to climate change on global and local scales. This mission will provide a comprehensive inventory of worldwide water resources, lakes, reservoir storage, and river dynamics. In this work, we carried out a preliminary assessment of SWOT’s Lake product Level 2 version 1.1, also known as “L2_HR_LakeSP”. The analysis was performed across six diverse lakes on three continents, revealing an average median bias of 0.08 m with respect to the considered reference, after suitable outlier removal. An overall precision of 0.22 m was found, combined with an average correlation of 68% between SWOT and reference time series. Moreover, the accuracy varied in the considered six lakes, since biases up to some decimeters were found for some of them; they could be due to residual inconsistencies between the vertical reference frame of SWOT and that of the considered reference. In summary, the first analysis of the “L2_HR_LakeSP” product, Version 1.1, demonstrated the promising potential of SWOT for monitoring seasonal variations in water levels. Nevertheless, notable anomalies were found in the water masks, particularly in higher latitudes, suggesting potential difficulties in accurately delineating water bodies in those regions. Additionally, a discernible reduction in accuracy was observed towards the end of the monitoring period. These preliminary findings indicate some issues that should be addressed in future investigations about the quality and potential of SWOT’s lake products for advancing our understanding of global water dynamics.

DSM generation from satellite imagery is a long-lasting issue and it has been addressed in several ways over the years; however, expert and users are continuously searching for simpler but accurate and reliable software solutions. One of the latest ones is provided by the commercial software Agisoft Metashape (since version 1.6), previously known as Photoscan, which joins other already available open-source and commercial software tools. The present work aims to quantify the potential of the new Agisoft Metashape satellite processing module, considering that to the best knowledge of the authors, only two papers have been published, but none considering cross-sensor imagery. Here we investigated two different case studies to evaluate the accuracy of the generated DSMs. The first dataset consists of a triplet of Pléiades images acquired over the area of Trento and the Adige valley (Northern Italy), which is characterized by a great variety in terms of geomorphology, land uses and land covers. The second consists of a triplet composed of a WorldView-3 stereo pair and a GeoEye-1 image, acquired over the city of Matera (Southern Italy), one of the oldest settlements in the world, with the worldwide famous area of Sassi and a very rugged morphology in the surroundings. First, we carried out the accuracy assessment using the RPCs supplied by the satellite companies as part of the image metadata. Then, we refined the RPCs with an original independent terrain technique able to supply a new set of RPCs, using a set of GCPs adequately distributed across the regions of interest. The DSMs were generated both in a stereo and multi-view (triplet) configuration. We assessed the accuracy and completeness of these DSMs through a comparison with proper references, i.e., DSMs obtained through LiDAR technology. The impact of the RPC refinement on the DSM accuracy is high, ranging from 20 to 40% in terms of LE90. After the RPC refinement, we achieved an average overall LE90 <5.0 m (Trento) and <4.0 m (Matera) for the stereo configuration, and <5.5 m (Trento) and <4.5 m (Matera) for the multi-view (triplet) configuration, with an increase of completeness in the range 5–15% with respect to stereo pairs. Finally, we analyzed the impact of land cover on the accuracy of the generated DSMs; results for three classes (urban, agricultural, forest and semi-natural areas) are also supplied.