Abstract Urban heat islands (UHIs) pose significant environmental challenges in rapidly urbanising regions, highlighting the need for high-quality spatial datasets to better characterise urban thermal patterns. The Local Climate Zones (LCZ) approach provides a standardised land-use framework for UHI research and is known to strongly correlate with Land Surface Temperature (LST). In this study, 27 LCZ maps for five Southeast Asian cities were generated using cloud-free Landsat 8/9 scenes. Corresp