Zina Mitraka is a Research Associate at the Remote Sensing Lab (rslab.gr) of FORTH. She is a mathematician by training (Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Crete, Greece) with further studies in Environmental Engineering (MSc in Environmental Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece) and a PhD on satellite Earth Observation for urban climate (Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy).
She is an Earth Observation specialist and she has been involved in several research and development projects, mainly related to optical and thermal satellite remote sensing with particular interest on the urban environment and the resilience of cities. She has extensive experience on methods and algorithms development for handling satellite data. She has several scientific publications is scientific journals and conference proceedings and she acts as a reviewer and academic editor in peer review journals.
Research objectives
The objectives of EO4UTEMP are:
- to investigate the links in different spatial scales of Urban Surface Temperature (UST);
- to develop an UST retrieval algorithm, designed to account for the particular properties of the urban surface and form;
- to exploit multi-temporal, multi-scale and multi-sensor satellite data in order to conclude to a synergistic UST retrieval methodology;
- to perform uncertainty analysis to quantify the impact of uncertainty from the different data sources, as well as the uncertainty of the final products;
- to validate the developed algorithms, using UST estimations from independent satellite sources and from in situ measurements;
- to apply the methodology for deriving time series of UST for a number of cities worldwide;
- to demonstrate the use of the derived UST products by a showcase;
- to provide the basis for further exploitation of ESA data for monitoring the temperature of cities and assist the study of the urban climate;
- to form the basis to initiate further scientific development in the context of EO and Earth System Science.
Read more in the research project sheet.
