Local Climate Zone Mapping in MENA: A Streamlined Remote Sensing and GIS Method with Hyperspectral Imagery

Average temperatures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are rising nearly twice the global rate, making extreme heatwaves increasingly likely. These trends pose severe threats to human well-being, ecosystems, and socio-economic activities. Thus, urban climate analysis tools are essential for addressing these challenges. In this context, Local Climate Zone (LCZ) mapping has gained attraction over the past decade, due to its capacity to quantify the Urban Heat Island (UHI) at fine spatial scales. However, while LCZ mapping has been widely carried out in Europe, North America and East Asia, its application in the MENA region remains limited. Recent work, carried out in Milan (Italy), has uncovered the potential of hyperspectral PRISMA imagery in improving the accuracy of LCZ mapping compared to multispectral Sentinel-2 data through a hybrid remote sensing and GIS-based method. In this work, such an approach is evaluated in three MENA cities, i.e. Cairo, Khartoum, and Algiers, with quite different land cover and urban morphologies compared to Milan. Overall accuracy increased by 10% for Khartoum, 12% for Algiers and 23% for Cairo when using PRISMA principal components, confirming that PRISMA data is indeed beneficial for enhancing LCZ mapping. Furthermore, the methodological pipeline is further improved by streamlining the data acquisition and processing and integrating a training sample quality control step. The resulting LCZ maps for each MENA city are presented, and implications and future research directions of this work are discussed.