Letter PLANHEAT’s Satellite-Derived Heating and Cooling Degrees Dataset for Energy Demand Mapping and Planning Panagiotis Sismanidis 1,*, Iphigenia Keramitsoglou 1, Stefano Barberis 2, Hrvoje Dorotić 3, Benjamin Bechtel 4 and Chris T. Kiranoudis 1,5 1 Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing, National Observatory of Athens, 15236 Athens, Greece 2 Corporate Research & Development Division, RINA Consulting S.p.A., 16145 Genova, Italy 3 Department of Energy, Power Engineering and Environment, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb, 10002 Zagreb, Croatia 4 Department of Geography, Ruhr-University Bochum, 44807 Bochum, Germany 5 School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 15780 Athens, Greece * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +20-210-810-9167 Received: date; Accepted: date; Published: 30 August 2019 Abstract: The urban heat island (UHI) effect influences the heating and cooling (H&C) energy demand of buildings and should be taken into account in H&C energy demand simulations. To provide information about this effect, the PLANHEAT integrated tool—which is a GIS-based, open- source software tool for selecting, simulating and comparing alternative low-carbon and economically sustainable H&C scenarios—includes a dataset of 1 × 1 km hourly heating and cooling degrees (HD and CD, respectively). HD and CD are energy demand proxies that are defined as the deviation of the outdoor surface air temperature from a base temperature, above or below which a building is assumed to need heating or cooling, respectively. PLANHEAT’s HD and CD are calculated from a dataset of gridded surface air temperatures that have been derived using satellite thermal data from Meteosat-10 Spinning Enhanced Visible and Near-Infrared Imager (SEVIRI).