Heat Island Mitigation Effects

"Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST) is software that estimates the impacts of urban heat island mitigation strategies on urban air temperature, ozone, and energy consumption. "The cooling strategies assessed include increasing urban albedo (reflectance), increasing urban vegetative cover (i.e. trees), or a combination of both. Alternatively, users can evaluate how a particular temperature change will impact ozone concentrations and energy use. The basic steps involved in running MIST are: (1) select the city to model, (2) define the mitigation strategy to test, and (3) estimate impacts on meteorology, air quality, and energy. All the data necessary to run MIST exists for over 240 cities."MIST is intended to provide qualitatively accurate assessments of the likely impacts of heat island mitigation strategies averaged at the city-scale. All results presented in this tool were obtained using state-of-the-science modeling tools. Nevertheless, the required assumptions and approximations dictate that the results presented are qualitative in nature. MIST is therefore a screening tool and not intended to be used for regulatory decision making." [from website]

Heat Island Mitigation Effects