Efficacy of Possible Strategies to Mitigate the Urban Heat Island Based on Urbanized High-Resolution Land Data Assimilation System (u-HRLDAS)

抄録

 Summer heat waves pose a great threat to public health in China. This paper took Wuhan (one of the four hottest furnaces cities in China) as an example to explore several strategies for mitigating the surface urban heat island (UHI) measured by the land surface temperature, including the use of green roofs, cool roofs, bright pavements, and alternations in urban building patterns. The offline urbanized High-Resolution Land Data Assimilation System (u-HRLDAS) was employed to conduct 1-km resolution numerical simulations, which also accounts for the effects of abundant lakes in Wuhan on UHI evolution with a dynamic lake model. The diurnal cycle and spatial distribution of simulated UHI were analyzed under different mitigation strategies. Results show that considering lake effects reduces the daytime (nighttime) UHI intensity by about 1.0 K (0.5 K). Employing green roofs and cool roofs are more effective in mitigating daytime UHI than the use of bright pavements. The maximum UHI reduction is about 2.1 K at 13:00 local time by replacing 80% of conventional roofs with green roofs. The UHI mitigation efficiency increases with larger fractions of green roofs, and increased albedo of roofs and roads. In contrast to the green roofs, cool roofs and bright pavements which are ineffective in nighttime, changing urban building pattern to mitigate the UHI is effective throughout the day. “Height-driven building structure changing” (raising the building height, and meanwhile changing the fraction of impervious surface in each grid to keep the total building volume intact) can reduce the surface UHI intensity by 0.4-0.9 K, and “density-driven building structure changing” (distributing building density uniformly and the building height are modified to make the total building volume unchanged) reduces UHI by 1.2-2.6 K. These results showed new insights in mitigating the urban heat islands for a mega city like Wuhan and provides a practical guideline for policymakers to offer a more habitable city.