Local Cooling Contribution

Local Cooling Contribution is EcoIntel’s measure of how much cooler a property runs than comparable neighbouring land, and whether that cooling holds up when the weather turns hot. It is read from satellite surface temperature, not modelled from vegetation, and it is reported alongside the Land Health Score as an independent outcome, never blended into it.

What it measures

A landscape that infiltrates rain, holds soil moisture and transpires through living plants turns some of the sun’s energy into water vapour instead of heat. That is evaporative cooling, and its signature is a cooler surface. Local Cooling Contribution captures that signature directly:

• Against comparable neighbours, on the same overpass. For every satellite pass, the property’s surface temperature is compared with a matched ring of surrounding land (cover, elevation and coast matched; 500 m inner gap to 10 km). Same sun, same day, so climate and season cancel out and what is left is the property’s own contribution.
• At midday. The comparison is fixed to midday overpasses (the peak-heat window), because that is when cooling matters and it removes time-of-day noise between sites.
• Under heat especially. The headline figure is the contrast on the hottest overpasses. A property that pulls further ahead of its neighbours as the heat rises is buffering; one that falls behind is amplifying.

The 1-to-9 scale

The result is banded 1 to 9, on the same grammar as the Land Health Score but on a buffering axis that is symmetric around a neutral midpoint:

Band	State	°C vs comparable land	Meaning
9	Strongly heat-buffering	≤ −1.75	Well below comparable land, pulling further ahead at the hottest overpasses
8	Heat-buffering	−1.75 to −1.25	Reliably cooler through the season; the buffer holds under heat
7	Cooling	−1.25 to −0.75	Measurably cooler, with a steady buffer
6	Mildly cooling	−0.75 to −0.25	A little cooler; the margin thins in the hottest weeks
5	Neutral	−0.25 to +0.25	Tracks its surroundings; about as warm as comparable land
4	Mildly warming	+0.25 to +0.75	A little warmer, more so under heat
3	Warming	+0.75 to +1.25	Measurably warmer; the gap widens under heat
2	Strongly warming	+1.25 to +1.75	Much warmer, and spikes under heat
1	Heat-amplifying	≥ +1.75	Hotter than comparable land, and hottest when its surroundings are hottest

The scale is fixed and physical (band 5 is parity with comparable land, half-degree steps either side), not fitted to any cohort, so a band means the same thing on every property and in every ecoregion. Because the comparison is always local, the °C values hold across climates: “−2°C” means two degrees cooler than local comparable land in a cool maritime climate or a hot continental one alike.

What sits behind the band

• Buffer slope: how much further the property pulls ahead per degree of regional heat, the clearest single expression of the dynamic.
• Persistence: the share of overpasses on which the property actually runs cooler, a measure of how reliable the buffer is.
• Stress response: how the cooling changes under combined heat and drought stress; cooling that deepens under stress is the resilience signal.
• Throughput (MW and litres per hectare): the scale of energy and water the land is moving into cooling. These are set by climate, not management, so they describe the size of the engine, not how well a property uses it.
• Albedo: reflectivity, the second cooling lever alongside evaporation. It explains how a surface sheds heat, and is reported as a descriptor, not a score (a bare, reflective surface can run cool while being poor land).

Relationship to the Land Health Score

Cooling is a consequence of a working water cycle, so it belongs on the platform’s 1-to-9 grammar, exactly as carbon is reported as an outcome of the four ecosystem processes and never as a fifth. It is shown beside the Land Health Score and is never summed into it: the score already contains the water-cycle function that produces the cooling, so folding the cooling back in would count the same thing twice.

In practice the two are independent measurements. The Land Health Score is read from vegetation and moisture proxies; the cooling band is read from surface temperature against real neighbours. Because the cooling band is a neighbour-relative contrast rather than an absolute score, a property can carry a strong buffer on modest land-health, or the reverse. That independence is the point: the cooling band adds a measured, outside check that the scores alone cannot give.

Honest limits

This is a developing, indicative read. The band and degree are shown only where the direction of the effect is statistically resolved; where it is within noise the property reads “in line with comparable land,” and where no thermal record exists it reads “reference not available.” The half-degree band steps sit within the measurement’s systematic uncertainty, so the band is best read as a communication scale rather than a precision instrument. Local and relative, never planetary, and never converted into or added to the carbon figures.