Revisiting the Climate Impacts of Cool Roofs around the Globe Using an Earth System Model

Abstract:

In this study, we use the Community Earth System Model to investigate the effects of employing cool roofs (i.e. increasing roof albedo from 0.15 to 0.9) on urban, regional, and global climates. After increasing the roof albedo, urban heat islands are reduced significantly over the globe during summer, and those at low latitudes during winter; the annual- and global-mean urban minus rural air temperature decreases from 1.6 K to 1.2 K. We mainly focus on changes in energy fluxes and climates in four regions: the United States, China, India, and Europe. For each region, solar radiation reflected by surface increases proportionally to the estimated albedo increase induced by roof albedo change. Without considering clouds, the increase in reflected solar radiation at surface leads to proportional increase in outgoing shortwave radiation at top of the atmosphere, suggesting a radiative cooling effect of cool roofs. On the other hand, the variations of cloud forcing in the model are more significant than the influence of cool roofs on energy balance at top of the atmosphere in some areas. Aerosols are known to partially offset the effects of cool roofs by absorbing solar radiation, and also reflecting radiation back to surface. However, we find that additional aerosol forcing is only 5-10% of the increase in reflected solar radiation at surface. Previous studies disagree in cool roof’s influence on global climate. We find that its influence on global mean temperature is negligible; the temperature decreases by 0.0015 K, with a high uncertainty of 0.026 K.