Using Remote Sensing To Quantify Albedo Of Roofs In Seven California Cities

The combination of global warming and urban sprawl is the origin of the most hazardous climate change effect detected at urban level: Urban Heat Island, representing the urban overheating respect to the countryside surrounding the city. This book includes 18 papers representing the state of the art of detection, assessment mitigation and adaption to urban overheating. Advanced methods, strategies and technologies are here analyzed including relevant issues as: the role of urban materials and fabrics on urban climate and their potential mitigation, the impact of greenery and vegetation to reduce urban temperatures and improve the thermal comfort, the role the urban geometry in the air temperature rise, the use of satellite and ground data to assess and quantify the urban overheating and develop mitigation solutions, calculation methods and application to predict and assess mitigation scenarios. The outcomes of the book are thus relevant for a wide multidisciplinary audience, including: environmental scientists and engineers, architect and urban planners, policy makers and students.

Urban Climate Change and Heat Islands: Characterization, Impacts, and Mitigation serves as a go to reference for a foundational understanding of urban-climate drivers and impacts. Through the book's comprehensive chapters, the authors help readers identify problems associated with urban climate change, along with potential solutions. Global case studies are included and presented in a way in which they become globally relevant to any urban or intra-urban environment. The authors call on their extensive experience to present and explore methodologies and approaches to quantifying urban-heat mitigation measures in a clear manner, focusing on heat islands, urban overheating and effects on air quality. Includes global case studies that demonstrate how to design and implement urban-heat mitigation measures that are area-specific and effective, under both current climate and future conditions Provides an overview of urban parameterizations in models leading to an improved understating of intra-urban climate variability drivers Assesses potential heat and air-quality health impacts of excessive heat events and changes in local urban climates

Albedo is a known and documented phenomenon, defined as the reflectivity of a surface, i.e., the ratio of reflected light energy to incident light energy. It is a dimensionless quantity, used in particular in agro-forestry, urban environment, cryosphere and geology. It is an Essential Climate Variable (ECV), deemed extremely meaningful to compute the earth heat balance. The albedo of natural surfaces varies largely, especially in the visible, with the lowest values found for water bodies and dense vegetation canopies and the highest values for desert and snow. It also changes with the angular distribution and spectral composition of the incident radiation and with the surface moisture. Satellite observations allow consistent measuring of the surface albedo at continental scale over a short period of time. Long-term series of surface albedo are good indicators of climate change, especially over glaciers and polar caps. On the other hand, the albedo of bare soil provides a good diagnostic of their degradation. The reliability of satellite albedo is verified against ground-based radiometers and UAV, which also serves to calibrate the instruments embarked on space-borne observing systems and check the quality of the atmospheric correction.

Stratospheric processes play a signi?cant role in regulating the weather and c- mate of the Earth system. Solar radiation, which is the primary source of energy for the tropospheric weather systems, is absorbed by ozone when it passes through the stratosphere, thereby modulating the solar-forcing energy reaching into the t- posphere. The concentrations of the radiatively sensitive greenhouse gases present in the lower atmosphere, such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone, control the radiation balance of the atmosphere by the two-way interaction between the stratosphere and troposphere. The stratosphere is the transition region which interacts with the weather s- tems in the lower atmosphere and the richly ionized upper atmosphere. Therefore, this part of the atmosphere provides a long list of challenging scienti?c problems of basic nature involving its thermal structure, energetics, composition, dynamics, chemistry, and modeling. The lower stratosphere is very much linked dynamically, radiatively,and chemically with the upper troposphere,even though the temperature characteristics of these regions are different. The stratosphere is a region of high stability, rich in ozone and poor in water - por and temperature increases with altitude. The lower stratospheric ozone absorbs the harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun and protects life on the Earth. On the other hand, the troposphere has high concentrations of water vapor, is low in ozone, and temperature decreases with altitude. The convective activity is more in the troposphere than in the stratosphere.

This book describes the algorithms, validation and preliminary analysis of the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) products, a long-term, high-quality dataset that is now freely available worldwide to government organizations and agencies, scientific research institutions, students and members of the general public. The GLASS products include leaf area index, broadband albedo, broadband emissivity, downward shortwave radiation and photosynthetically active radiation. The first three GLASS products cover 1981 to 2012 with 1km and 5km spatial resolutions and 8-day temporal resolution, and the last two GLASS products span 2008 to 2010 with 3-hour temporal resolution and 5km spatial resolution. These GLASS products are unique. The first three are spatially continuous and cover the longest period of time among all current similar satellite products. The other two products are the highest spatial-resolution global radiation products from satellite observations that are currently available. These products can be downloaded from Beijing Normal University at http://glass-product.bnu.edu.cn/ and the University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility at http://www.glcf.umd.edu/ The GLASS products are the outcome of a key research project entitled “Generation & Applications of Global Products of Essential Land Variables”, supported by funding from the High-Tech Research and Development Program of China and involving dozens of institutions and nearly one hundred scientists and researchers. Following an introduction, the book contains five chapters corresponding to these five GLASS products: background, algorithm, quality control and validation, preliminary analysis and applications. It discusses the long-term environmental changes detected from the GLASS products and other data sources at both global and local scales and also provides detailed analysis of regional hotspots where environmental changes are mainly associated with climate change, drought, land-atmosphere interactions, and human activities. The book is based primarily on a set of published journal papers about these five GLASS products and includes updated information. Since these products have now begun to be widely used, this book is an essential reference document. It is also a very helpful resource to anyone interested in satellite remote sensing and its applications.