Finding ways to turn down the heat in cities
Rooftop gardens and greenery can help ease some of the severe heat in cities, according to research from climate scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. For several decades, researchers have promoted replacing black tar and other dark-colored roofing materials with bright, Sun-reflecting surfaces or"green roofs" full of plant cover. Now they have used freely available satellite data to measure how effective these changes are.
Braneon and the GISS team partnered with Chicago's Public Health and Planning and Development departments to study three sites that had installed green roofs in the early 2000s: Millennium Park, City Hall, and a Walmart shopping center. Using imagery captured by the Landsat 5 satellite between 1990 and 2011, the researchers compared changes in land surface temperatures and vegetation abundance at the study sites as well as nearby control sites without green roofs.
"In a lot of places, you might be developing an area that didn't have something there before; it just had overgrown vegetation," said Braneon, who co-leads urban research for the Climate Impacts Group at GISS."You might think that putting a green roof on your new building would make a significant impact. But what we see is that a lot of impervious material may also be added there -- such as a parking lot around the building.
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