CITIES can battle the “urban heat island” with paint. Highly reflective white roofs could cool cities by an average of 0.6 °C, according to a global simulation.
Dark city surfaces like roofs and roads absorb and radiate heat, leaving cities up to 3 °C hotter than surrounding areas. A team at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, combined climate models with a simulation of how temperatures are modified by city landscapes.
They found that in a hypothetical world in which cities sported highly reflective white roofs, urban temperatures were on average 0.6 °C cooler than in…
