Investigating Climate Impacts of Urbanization and the Potential for Cool Roofs to Mitigate the Kansas City Metropolitan Area’s Urban Heat Island Effect

An urban heat island (UHI) is a phenomenon where the temperatures within cities are greater than those of surrounding rural areas due to human activity and physical properties of urban surfaces. This effect can cause the annual mean temperature within cities to be up to 3oC more than its surroundings. As cities have grown with the migration of people from rural to urban areas, the UHI effect has impacted an increasing number of people over time. One method that has been investigated as a way to mitigate the UHI phenomenon is to increase the albedo in cities, which would reflect a greater amount of solar radiation away from urban surfaces compared to conventional materials (e.g. dark asphalt shingles). In this study, we utilize the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to investigate the UHI under different scenarios during the same heat wave event (i.e. July 2012) in the Kansas City metropolitan area (KCMA). First a suite of sensitivity simulations is performed and analyzed in order to determine the best combination of physical parameterizations for subsequent scenarios. Next, the difference in urban temperatures from 1938 and 2011 is investigated by using land cover data sets representing these two periods of time. Lastly, two cool roof simulations will be performed to determine the effectiveness of this mitigation strategy on reducing temperatures within the KCMA. The first scenario will represent “newly installed” cool roofs with an albedo of 0.8, and the second will model “aged” cool roofs with an albedo of 0.5. Over the past seven decades, temperatures in the KCMA have been exacerbated by the increase in city size and impervious surface density. Our results indicate that both newly installed and aged cool roof materials are able to mitigate the urban temperatures and the UHI effect during a heat wave in July 2012.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S. (Master of Science)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Environmental and Urban Geosciences (UMKC)

Grantor

University of Missouri--Kansas City

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Reed, Kyle

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sun, Fengpeng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10355/73982

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/73982