Remote sensing science to inform urban climate change mitigation strategies

•The physical organization and structure of urban areas is central to urban energy use.•Remote sensing can inform research on urban emissions and climate impacts.•Advances are required to study emissions in large sets and samples of cities.

Remote sensing offers unique perspectives to study the relationship between urban systems and climate change because it provides spatially explicit and synoptic views of the landscape that are available at multiple grains, extents, and over time. While remote sensing has made significant advances in the study of urban areas, especially urban heat island and urban land change, there are myriad unanswered science and policy questions to which remote sensing science could contribute. Here we identify several key opportunities for remote sensing science to increase our understanding of the relationships between urban systems and climate change.