Impacts

Urban heat island mitigation strategies can impact the urban environment in two distinct ways - directly and indirectly. The direct impacts of mitigation strategies are those that result from direct modification of the surface energy balance of buildings. For example, when a rooftop albedo (reflectance) is increased the roof remains cooler under the hot summer sun and as a result the cooling load (and air conditioning energy consumption) is reduced for that building. In addition, the implementation of heat island mitigation strategies can have an indirect impact on the entire city. For example, cool roofs convect less heat to the air that flows over them. The result is a city-scale cooling of near-surface air temperatures. If the mitigation strategy has sufficient spatial extent this indirect cooling can impact city-scale temperatures, air quality, and energy consumption. This effect has been demonstrated in regional scale simulations of various mitigation strategies.

 

Advanced users seeking more detailed information on this and other topics related to the scientific and modeling underpinnings of the MIST software tool should read the detailed model description document that can be downloaded from the MIST website.