Radiative forcing and temperature response to changes in urban albedos and associated CO2 offsets
By S. Menon, H. Akbari, S. Mahanama, I. Sednev, R. Levinson. 2010
203 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The two main forcings that can counteract to some extent the positive forcings from greenhouse gases from pre-industrial times to present day are the aerosol and related aerosol-cloud forcings, and the radiative response to changes in surface albedo. Here, we quantify the change in radiative forcing and land surface temperature that may be obtained by increasing the albedos of roofs and pavements in urban areas in temperate and tropical regions of the globe by 0.1. Using the catchment land surface model (the land model coupled to the GEOS-5 Atmospheric General Circulation Model), we quantify the change in the total outgoing (outgoing shortwave+longwave) radiation and land surface temperature to a 0.1 increase in urban albedos for all global land areas. The global average increase in the total outgoing radiation was 0.5 W m−2, and temperature decreased by ∼0.008 K for an average 0.003 increase in surface albedo. These averages represent all global land areas where data were available from the land surface model used and are for the boreal summer (June–July–August). For the continental US the total outgoing radiation increased by 2.3 W m−2, and land surface temperature decreased by ∼0.03 K for an average 0.01 increase in surface albedo. Based on these forcings, the expected emitted CO2 offset for a plausible 0.25 and 0.15 increase in albedos of roofs and pavements, respectively, for all global urban areas, was found to be ∼57 Gt CO2. A more meaningful evaluation of the impacts of urban albedo increases on global climate and the expected CO2 offsets would require simulations which better characterize urban surfaces and represent the full annual cycle.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97fbe2e5699e7550507671b3981e2aaa1f926ca7
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Citations in the corpus
- Regional climate consequences of large-scale cool roof and photovoltaic array deployment (2011, methodology): “beyond building-level energy savings, cool surfaces have been studied as a method for reducing urban temperatures and ozone concentrations (Taha 2008b, 2008c), and potentially, for reducing radiative forcing on a global scale (Akbari et al 2009, Menon et al 2010, Oleson et al 2010). Many studies hav”
- RAMI4PILPS: An intercomparison of formulations for the partitioning of solar radiation in land surface models (2011, background): “…land cover change, in particular, is a spatially highly heterogeneous perturbation where regional effects often differ in sign, so that they may cancel out on global averages despite possibly large regional climate impacts [e.g., Pongratz et al., 2009; Menon et al., 2010; Campra et al., 2008].”
- The long-term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas (2012, result): “A follow up study obtained similar results through detailed simulations using the land component (CLSM) of the NASA GEOS-5 climate model to quantify the effects of changes to RF and temperature when the albedos of roofs and pavements in urban areas were increased (Menon et al 2010).”
- Economic comparison of white, green, and black flat roofs in the United States (2014, background): “0 30 20 20 [2 7]”