The long-term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas

By H. Akbari, D. Matthews, D. Seto. 2012

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Solar reflective urban surfaces (white rooftops and light-colored pavements) can increase the albedo of an urban area by about 0.1. Increasing the albedo of urban and human settlement areas can in turn decrease atmospheric temperature and could potentially offset some of the anticipated temperature increase caused by global warming. We have simulated the long-term (decadal to centennial) effect of increasing urban surface albedos using a spatially explicit global climate model of intermediate complexity. We first carried out two sets of simulations in which we increased the albedo of all land areas between ±20° and ±45° latitude respectively. The results of these simulations indicate a long-term global cooling effect of 3 × 10−15 K for each 1 m2 of a surface with an albedo increase of 0.01. This temperature reduction corresponds to an equivalent CO2 emission reduction of about 7 kg, based on recent estimates of the amount of global warming per unit CO2 emission. In a series of additional simulations, we increased the albedo of urban locations only, on the basis of two independent estimates of the spatial extent of urban areas. In these simulations, global cooling ranged from 0.01 to 0.07 K, which corresponds to a CO2 equivalent emission reduction of 25–150 billion tonnes of CO2.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d6627a514e266145a51f13b39d896e41260c857

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Citations in the corpus

Quality and sensitivity of high-resolution numerical simulation of urban heat islands (2014, background): “These mitigation strategies have been studied at building-scales (see e.g., Li et al 2013b; Sun et al 2014; Susca et al 2011; Takebayashi and Moriyama 2007) or global-scales (e.g., Jacobson and Ten Hoeve 2012; Oleson et al 2010; Akbari et al 2012).”
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Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “ying clouds trap less heat), and stratospheric aerosol injection [649] (which we discuss below). Other candidates (which are either less effective or harder to implement) include “white-roof” methods [650] and even launching sunshades into space [651]. Injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratospher”
Optics for concentrating photovoltaics: Trends, limits and opportunities for materials and design (2016, background): “albedo change in an area than flat plate PV panels [1,2].”