TY - JOUR
T1 - The Regional Impact of Urban Heat Mitigation Strategies on Planetary Boundary Layer Dynamics Over a Semiarid City
AU - Song, Jiyun
AU - Wang, Zhihua
AU - Wang, Chenghao
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is mainly supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Urban Sustainability program (grant CBET-1435881). J. Song is currently supported by two EPSRC grants in U.K.: Managing Air for Green Inner Cities (MAGIC; EP/N010221/1) and Low Carbon Climate-responsive Heating and Cooling of Cities (LoHCool; EP/N009797/1). The NCAR/CISL supercomputing resources used for model simulation and analysis are greatly acknowledged. The large-scale forcing used in this study, that is, the gridded reanalysis data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Final (NCEP FNL) Operational Model Global Tropospheric Analyses, can be retrieved from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Computational and Information Systems Laboratory Research Data Archive (http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ ds083.2/#access).The observation data used for model validation can be obtained from Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAPLTER) database (https:// sustainability.asu.edu/caplter/data/) and NOAA/ESRL radiosonde database (http://esrl.noaa.gov/raobs/).
Publisher Copyright:
©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2018/6/27
Y1 - 2018/6/27
N2 - The rapid urbanization and associated landscape changes strongly modulate heat and moisture transfer processes on the urban surface as well as in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) via urban land-atmosphere interactions. In this study, we employed the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with realistic urban dynamics to assess the effects of two urban landscaping strategies for urban heat mitigation (viz., green roofs and white roofs) on the PBL dynamics for hot summer periods over a semiarid city, Phoenix of Arizona. Our results show that the effects of green roofs and white roofs on PBL dynamics are markedly different at daytime and nighttime. At daytime, both roofing systems reduce the sensible heat flux significantly by ~150 W/m2, lower the PBL height by ~700 m, and decrease the maximum convective available potential energy (CAPE) by ~40 J/kg over the built terrain. At nighttime, both sensible and latent heat fluxes increase with green roofs by ~4 and ~6 W/m2, respectively. In contrast, with white roofs, a marginal reduction of sensible heat flux by ~4 W/m2 was observed, owing to the remnant effect of daytime cooling. In addition, both roofing systems reduce the CAPE over the urban core but increase the CAPE over the rural surrounding, implying that the use of green or white roofs may potentially enhance the probability of precipitation toward the outskirt of the city.
AB - The rapid urbanization and associated landscape changes strongly modulate heat and moisture transfer processes on the urban surface as well as in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) via urban land-atmosphere interactions. In this study, we employed the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with realistic urban dynamics to assess the effects of two urban landscaping strategies for urban heat mitigation (viz., green roofs and white roofs) on the PBL dynamics for hot summer periods over a semiarid city, Phoenix of Arizona. Our results show that the effects of green roofs and white roofs on PBL dynamics are markedly different at daytime and nighttime. At daytime, both roofing systems reduce the sensible heat flux significantly by ~150 W/m2, lower the PBL height by ~700 m, and decrease the maximum convective available potential energy (CAPE) by ~40 J/kg over the built terrain. At nighttime, both sensible and latent heat fluxes increase with green roofs by ~4 and ~6 W/m2, respectively. In contrast, with white roofs, a marginal reduction of sensible heat flux by ~4 W/m2 was observed, owing to the remnant effect of daytime cooling. In addition, both roofing systems reduce the CAPE over the urban core but increase the CAPE over the rural surrounding, implying that the use of green or white roofs may potentially enhance the probability of precipitation toward the outskirt of the city.
KW - convective available potential energy
KW - green roof
KW - planetary boundary layer dynamics
KW - semiarid city
KW - urban heat mitigation
KW - white roof
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U2 - 10.1029/2018JD028302
DO - 10.1029/2018JD028302
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049866234
SN - 2169-897X
VL - 123
SP - 6410
EP - 6422
JO - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
JF - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
IS - 12
ER -