Geoneon Heat

Extreme heat is one of the most urgent risks facing Australian cities, but heat is not distributed evenly: some neighbourhoods are consistently hotter because of hard surfaces, limited canopy and dense built form, and these areas often overlap with more vulnerable residents. Councils need a consistent, repeatable way to see where heat concentrates, who is most exposed and where cooling action should be prioritised.

Geoneon Heat is a heat-risk mapping service from Geoneon, an Earth-observation company based in Tasmania. It derives a Heat Susceptibility Index from median summer land surface temperature calculated from multiple Landsat 8 and 9 thermal images, then combines it with building footprints, census age and socio-economic disadvantage data to produce a Heat Exposure Index, a Social Vulnerability Index and a Residential Heat Risk Index; all four indices are scored 1 to 10. Greening-prioritisation layers combine residential risk with canopy information to show where planting or shade would deliver the greatest cooling benefit. Analyses are configured per project around the geography and available data. Results are delivered as GeoTIFF and Shapefiles, WMS/WFS web services, web maps and reports.

The indices have been produced for the City of Hobart and Brighton Council in Tasmania, and in an Adelaide pilot across seven local government areas with SmartSat CRC, Green Adelaide and Flinders University. For the City of Launceston, Geoneon analysed land surface temperature, canopy and population vulnerability to identify priority areas for its Urban Greening Strategy; that work, delivered with the University of Tasmania, City of Launceston and WSP, won a 2025 Planning Institute of Australia National Award for Planning Excellence. Geoneon notes that the outputs are relative prioritisation indicators, and that satellite land surface temperature is not air temperature.