Conference Editor

Jianshun Zhang; Edward Bogucz; Cliff Davidson; Elizabeth Krietmeyer

Keywords:

Cooling efficiency; Green roof; Heat island mitigation; Urban planning

Location

Syracuse, NY

Event Website

http://ibpc2018.org/

Start Date

25-9-2018 10:30 AM

End Date

25-9-2018 12:00 PM

Description

Green roofs, with adequate water supply, have been proven as effective measures to reduce urban environmental temperature. The benefits of large-scale deployment of green roofs have been studied mainly through numerical simulations with unrealistic high penetration scenarios, where all rooftops across the entire metropolis is assumed to be retrofitted. In this study, the scale dependence of the cooling effect of green roofs is investigated with a coverage of 25% over buildings at local, city, or regional scales. We compared results at 6 major U.S. cities to assess the response of the scale dependence to geoclimatic conditions. High-resolution weather simulations reveal that the cooling of near-surface air temperature by green roofs increases non-linearly with the scale of deployment. The shape and geoclimatic setting (geographic and climatic characteristics) of metropolitan areas control the scaling that some city centers are not able to achieve a significant cooling by greening their own rooftops. Uniform deployment of green roofs at the regional scale, on the other hand, provides a substantial temperature reduction with a very low cooling efficiency per intervention area. Cities should carefully revisit the scale dependences of cooling benefit and efficiency of green roofs to develop resilient plans meeting their expectations.

Comments

If you are experiencing accessibility issues with this item, please contact the Accessibility and Inclusion Librarian through lib-accessibility@syr.edu with your name, SU NetID, the SURFACE link, title of record, and author & and reason for request.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14305/ibpc.2018.gb-2.02

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

COinS
 
Sep 25th, 10:30 AM Sep 25th, 12:00 PM

Greening rooftops to reduce heat islands: How large is large enough?

Syracuse, NY

Green roofs, with adequate water supply, have been proven as effective measures to reduce urban environmental temperature. The benefits of large-scale deployment of green roofs have been studied mainly through numerical simulations with unrealistic high penetration scenarios, where all rooftops across the entire metropolis is assumed to be retrofitted. In this study, the scale dependence of the cooling effect of green roofs is investigated with a coverage of 25% over buildings at local, city, or regional scales. We compared results at 6 major U.S. cities to assess the response of the scale dependence to geoclimatic conditions. High-resolution weather simulations reveal that the cooling of near-surface air temperature by green roofs increases non-linearly with the scale of deployment. The shape and geoclimatic setting (geographic and climatic characteristics) of metropolitan areas control the scaling that some city centers are not able to achieve a significant cooling by greening their own rooftops. Uniform deployment of green roofs at the regional scale, on the other hand, provides a substantial temperature reduction with a very low cooling efficiency per intervention area. Cities should carefully revisit the scale dependences of cooling benefit and efficiency of green roofs to develop resilient plans meeting their expectations.

https://surface.syr.edu/ibpc/2018/GB2/2

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.