Free tools · Measured from space
Heat in Ward 13, Ray Nkonyeni
No summer seen clearly enough yet.
Land surface temperature is how hot the ground itself is: roofs, roads, bare soil and leaves, as a satellite sees them from above. Landsat passes at about 10 in the morning and sees only through clear skies. It is not the air temperature a weather station gives: on a sunny day the ground is often 10 to 20 degrees hotter than the air, and hard, dark, dry surfaces heat up most while trees, grass and water stay cooler.
What it is not: not the afternoon peak, not the night, not the air you feel in the shade, and not a reading at any one house. A month with clouds rests on few clear looks.
Every summer since 1985
The shape of a year
Ray Nkonyeni and its wards · Every municipality, ranked
Source
Measured from space by the American Landsat satellites: the ground, not the air.
How we worked this out
Landsat 5 to 2011, Landsat 7 to bridge the gaps, Landsat 8 and 9 from 2013: different satellites pass at slightly different times, so compare summers within the same years first.
What we changed: we kept only the clear land cells (no cloud, cloud shadow, snow or water, with a margin round each cloud), read them at 480 m, and averaged them over each 2026 ward each month; larger places are the sums of their wards.
Landsat imagery courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey (Landsat Collection 2 surface temperature, through Digital Earth Africa’s copy).
Dataset: land surface temperature by ward, release of 13 November 2026.