Discussion

We found that there was a negative autocorrelation between the vegetation abundance and the land surface temperature in the city of Geneva. It seems acceptable to state that adding more green areas in cities would prevent cities from excessive land surface temperature, and thus from excessive radiative cooling during the night. Indeed, ground's heat is usually released to the atmosphere through radiations during the night and can be very important in urban zones. In this case, the city of Geneva showed a sensitive area in the city center which has a very low vegetation abundance. This suggests that it could be important to focus efforts on the localization and development of these sensitive areas in cities. The data used were not complete : there are some areas in which only a few measurements have been made but the trends were still understandable. One might wonder which type of green areas would be the most efficient to control heat excess in urban areas and it would be interesting to do some experiments and measurements about this in the future.