Untitled Document Microclimate Variation in the Suburban Environment C.K. Smith, H. Akbari One focus of research in the Heat Island Project is the use of shade trees and high-albedo surfaces to reduce urban temperatures. In addition to cooling surfaces and structures in their immediate vicinity, such features can contribute to the reduction in air temperature over an entire neighborhood, resulting in a neighborhood-wide or indirect cooling effect. Experiments to assess the potential magnitude of these indirect effects often compare air temperatures measured near the ground in neighborhoods having different albedos or densities of trees.
Necessity dictates the measurements be made at one or a few discrete locations.
Yet the urban and suburban environments are filled with man-made and natural features that alter the ambient air temperature in their vicinity, i.e., they give rise to localized or microclimate effects. If discrete air temperature measurements are to reflect an entire neighborhood, the influence of microclimate effects on these measurements must be minimized. We performed an experiment to monitor ambient air temperature at 18 locations around a suburban residence, from which we identified a multitude of microclimate effects. Temperature data, along with horizontal insolation, relative humidity, and wind speed and direction, were logged every 2.7 seconds for the period September 11 to November 7, 1994. In the absence of any objective measure of the unperturbed neighborhood climate of the site, we used the spatial average temperature, derived from 13 locations monitored continuously over the course of the experiment.