The Scale Issue

This chapter begins with a discussion on the requirements for mapping urban materials, land cover, and land use, and their relationships. This examination allows readers to understand what spectral property can and cannot be considered in the imaging and mapping. The level of detail in classification categories is essentially modulated by spectral resolution. But, another important consideration in urban remote sensing is spatial resolution. Scale influences the examination of landscape patterns. The change of scale is relevant to the issues of data aggregation, information transfer, and the identification of appropriate scales for analysis. The chapter also assesses the patterns of land surface temperature (LST) at different aggregation levels in order to find out the operational scale/the optimal scale through two case studies. One focuses on LST variability across multiple census levels (block, block group, and tract) and the other focuses on multi‐scale residential population estimation modeling.