Local climate zones datasets from five Southern European cities: Copernicus based classification maps of Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Marseille and Naples.

Here, we provide Local Climate Zones (LCZ) map datasets from five Southern European Mediterranean cities: Athens (Greece), Barcelona (Spain), Lisbon (Portugal), Marseille (France) and Naples (Italy). The maps were produced according to a geographic information system (GIS)-based classification method, using freely available Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) input data. Several maps are provided: (i) five LCZv1 maps (one per city) depicting urban LCZ's aggregated by density (no building height information); (ii) five LCZv1_leaf maps (one per city), identical to the previously mentioned ones, with tree cover LCZ classes A and B reclassification according to the Dominant Leaf Type (DLT) (deciduous or coniferous); (iii) two LCZv1_BH maps (Athens and Lisbon) distinguishing urban LCZ classes 123 and 456 according to the dominant building height (BH); and (iv) two LCZv1_leaf_BH maps (Athens and Lisbon) identical to the previous ones with added DLT-based land cover classification. The LCZ classification maps are available in both ArcGIS .lyr layer and GeoTIFF raster formats (Appendix 1 and 2), with a spatial resolution of 50×50m pixels, and are suitable to urban climate-related studies, particularly at the metropolitan and city scales of analysis. The data here provided is related to the article entitled «Local Climate Zones in five Southern European cities: an improved GIS-based classification method based on free data from the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service» [1], and the corresponding method/ArcGIS based custom Toolbox is freely available in «Local Climate Zones classification from Copernicus Land Monitoring Service datasets: an ArcGIS-based Toolbox» [2].