Urban areas tend to be warmer than their rural surroundings, well-known as the "urban heat island" effect. Higher nocturnal air temperature (T air ) is associated with adverse effects on human health, higher mortality rates, and higher energy consumption. Prediction of the spatial distribution of T air is a step toward the "Smart City" concept, providing an early warning system for vulnerable populations. The study of the spatial distribution of urban T air was thus far limited by the low spatial resolution of traditional data sources. Volunteered geographic information provides alternative data with higher spatial density, with citizen weather stations monitoring T air continuously in hundreds or thousands of locations within a single city. In this article, the aim was to predict the spatial distribution of nocturnal T air in Berlin, Germany, one day in advance at a 30-m resolution using open-source remote sensing and geodata from Landsat and Urban Atlas, crowdsourced T air data, and machine learning (ML) methods. Results were tested with a "leave-one-date-out" training scheme (testing crowd ) and reference T air data (testing ref ). Three ML algorithms were compared-Random Forest (RF), Stochastic Gradient Boosting, and Model Averaged Neural Network. The optimal model based on accuracy and computational speed is RF, with an average root mean square error (RMSE) for testing crowd of 1.16°C (R 2 = 0.512) and RMSE for testing ref of 1.97°C (R 2 = 0.581). Overall, the most important geographic information system (GIS) predictors were morphometric parameters and albedo. The proposed method relies on open-source datasets and can, therefore, be adapted to many cities worldwide.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations –citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.