RT Journal Article SR 00 ID 10.1109/JSTARS.2016.2531420 A1 Bechtel, B. A1 See, L. A1 Mills, G. A1 Foley, M. T1 Classification of Local Climate Zones Using SAR and Multispectral Data in an Arid Environment JF IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing YR 2016 FD 2016-03-29 VO 9 IS 7 SP 3097 OP 3105 K1 urban areas, Multisensor systems, remote sensing, satellite applications, synthetic aperture radar AB There is an urgent need for more detailed spatial information on cities globally that has been acquired using a standard method to facilitate comparison and the transfer of scientific and practical knowledge between places. As part of the world urban database and access portal tools (WUDAPT) initiative, a simple workflow has been developed to perform this task. Using freely available satellite imagery (Landsat) and software (SAGA), WUDAPT characterizes settlements using the local climate zone (LCZ) scheme, which decomposes the city into distinctive neighborhoods (>1 km2) based on typical properties (e.g., green proportion and built fraction). In this paper, the methodology is extended to examine the effect of adding synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, which is now freely available from Sentinel 1, for generating LCZs. Using the city of Khartoum as a case study, the results show that combining multispectral and SAR data improves the overall performance of several classifiers, with random forest (RF) performing the best overall. PB IEEE SN 1939-1404 LK https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/13945/