Thursday, August 27, 2015

NASA finds vegetation essential for limiting city warming effects

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/nsfc-nfv082515.php

Public Release: 25-Aug-2015
NASA finds vegetation essential for limiting city warming effects

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Cities are well known hot spots - literally. The urban heat island effect has long been observed to raise the temperature of big cities by 1 to 3°C (1.8 to 5.4°F), a rise that is due to the presence of asphalt, concrete, buildings, and other so-called impervious surfaces disrupting the natural cooling effect provided by vegetation. According to a new NASA study that makes the first assessment of urbanization impacts for the entire continental United States, the presence of vegetation is an essential factor in limiting urban heating.

Impervious surfaces' biggest effect is causing a difference in surface temperature between an urban area and surrounding vegetation. The researchers, who used multiple satellites' observations of urban areas and their surroundings combined into a model, found that averaged over the continental United States, areas covered in part by impervious surfaces, be they downtowns, suburbs, or interstate roads, had a summer temperature 1.9°C higher than surrounding rural areas. In winter, the temperature difference was 1.5 °C higher in urban areas.

"This has nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. It's in addition to the greenhouse gas effect. This is the land use component only," said Lahouari Bounoua, research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study.

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The urban heat island effect occurs primarily during the day when urban impervious surfaces absorb more solar radiation than the surrounding vegetated areas, resulting in a few degrees temperature difference. The urban area has also lost the trees and vegetation that naturally cool the air. As a by-product of photosynthesis, leaves release water back into to the atmosphere in a process called evapotranspiration, which cools the local surface temperature the same way that sweat evaporating off a person's skin cools them off. Trees with broad leaves, like those found in many deciduous forests on the East coast, have more pores to exchange water than trees with needles, and so have more of a cooling effect.

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In cities like Phoenix built in the desert, the urban area actually has a cooling effect because of irrigated lawns and trees that wouldn't be there without the city.

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At the human level, a rise of 1°C can raise energy demands for air conditioning in the summer from 5 to 20 percent in the United States, according the Environmental Protection Agency. So even though 0.3°C may seem like a small difference, it still may have impact on energy use, said Bounoua, especially when urban heat island effects are exacerbated by global temperature rises due to climate change.

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