What methods would be well-suited to measuring the Urban Heat Island effect?

This article on this link may be useful: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263514000399

White would be the best colour and that is the standard  colour of houses in most hot countries. Green tiles would reflect only the green portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. 

I thought, by green roofs, Andrea meant those covered in living vegetation. Those would absorb carbon dioxide so reducing the local greenhouse effect, and the heat absorbed would be converted into chemical energy and released as oxygen.

A net radiometer on a drone or helicopter would quantify theffect as distance from the soil increases and the surroundings of a roof start to appear in thesensitive area of radimeter, but ventilation and wind resistance can be of main impact. Road pavement and shade distribution within buildings has been studied in the design of Laurie Baker and also le mur vegtal of Partic Blanc are good references for masking hot walls,  http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/projects/natural-ventilation-in-the-work-of-laurie-baker-1.html

Are U planning to grow the green roof yourself or its existing already?

If you are growing it by yourself, surface and air temperature measurements on the planting roof and reference roof is ideal. With this U can calculate temperature difference per plant growth stage.

do the same if you are using existing green roof, only the growth stage temperature difference monitoring would be lacking.

In any case , this measurement should be conducted simultaneously at pedestrian and rooftop level.

GoodLuck!! 

I justt add a ref for a more complex app. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JZ068i001p00235/full

It will be important which urban heat island you mean! The normal UHI menas air temperature differences, The Surface UHI (SUHI) means surface temperatures captured from a satellite or air plane. The results are quite different and at least during daytime SUHI is not equal to UHI !!! In any case a proper instrumentation is required. It is also relevant at which location you put the "urban" sensors and the "rural" ones. A green public park is not really an urban site with modified heat and radiation fluxes. It is more a rural site within a city environment.

As already mentioned green roofs improve the UHI effect only if the vegetation evapotranspirates. In very many cases the roof vegetation is often more xerophytic and can survive weeks without any rain. From an energetic point of view this kind of "green roof" behaves like a standard gravel roof.

Maybe that  these articles might help a bit.

Regards

Eberhard

It will be important which urban heat island you mean! The normal UHI menas air temperature differences, The Surface UHI (SUHI) means surface temperatures captured from a satellite or air plane. The results are quite different and at least during daytime SUHI is not equal to UHI !!! In any case a proper instrumentation is required. It is also relevant at which location you put the "urban" sensors and the "rural" ones. A green public park is not really an urban site with modified heat and radiation fluxes. It is more a rural site within a city environment.

As already mentioned green roofs improve the UHI effect only if the vegetation evapotranspirates. In very many cases the roof vegetation is often more xerophytic and can survive weeks without any rain. From an energetic point of view this kind of "green roof" behaves like a standard gravel roof.

Maybe that  these articles might help a bit.

Regards

Eberhard

A key to measure urban heat island intensity is how to determine the rural observational sites.  A method developed by Ren and Ren (2011, journal of climate) and lately used by many including Yang et al. (2013, journal of applied meteorology and climate) may be useful to your study. Good luck.

Kenneth,

If you must keep posting your denialist propoganda you could at least provide the sources for your documents to enable us to decide on their credibility. That excerpt is obviouly not from a peer reviewed source.

Kenneth ... Denying that global warming is happening (you seem to think that because the USA has not followed the global trends that means the global trend has not happened), denying that the main cause of global warming is our emissions of carbon dioxide (and blaming the temperature rise on the increase in global population), and finally denying that it is going to cause catastrophic climate change that will result in the drowning of all port cities and world wide famine as agricultural land around the coast is destroyed, and desertification and intensification of typhoons and monsoons continually destroy crops. (You seem to believe that since you are now able to the affluent life of a Westerner, then the suffering of others in the future will be all worthwhile!).

This is all explained in the FEEM Lecture by Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, University of Cambridge: "Arctic Amplification, Climate Change, Global Warming. New Challenges from the Top of the World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-qdbICw2f8

Dear colleagues, let me humbly suggest that this is not the site to keep this kind of discussion. Please, post only answers to Andrea's question.

(On the other side, I do not see any denialist tendency in http://climatesight.org/tag/urban-heat-island-effect/ ...)

Jose,

You are quite right. Kenneth is not quoting from a denialist blog. I only know that now since you, and not he, has pointed me to his source. However, what I would claim is that he circled two excerpts from the blog which suited his denialist agenda. In effect he was quoting these two comments out of context in order to throw doubt on the reliabilty of GISS. I thought it only right to point out that he has an agenda.

Although Ken's first comment was relevant to the Urban Heat Island effect, it is not really a technique that can be applied to discriminate between the UHI from normal roofs and green roofs since they will have similar street lighting. My suggestion would be to measure the IR radiation emitted by the roof and compare it with the IR emitted by a conventional roof, possibly using locally mounted pyrgeometers or one mounted on an aircraft. See

C. P. Lo, D. A. Quattrochi & J. C. Luvall

Application of high-resolution thermal infrared remote sensing and GIS to assess the urban heat island effect International Journal of Remote Sensing

Volume 18, Issue 2, 1997

DOI:10.1080/014311697219079

Thank you very much for all of your replies!

Towns as heat sinks is different from single building design. To reach an island effect we miss experiments but another issue is about walls that are exposed to solar radiation. Often these can contribute more than roof surfeces for irradiation angles and relative surfaces. Laurie Baker and Patric Blanc developped different solutions at a variety of  inestements under different climates. Patric Blanc uses vegetated and irrigated surfaces whereas Baker developped air piping and double walls. Infrared radiometry and air temperature were moderated in these ways. Going to the question local effects of a single roof are pertaining  the roof temperature and energy requirement of the buidilg but the interaction with town temperature  is far from solution. Remote sensing can test different ares with variable vegetation density, under different advective transfer.

Is this artcle from NASA, and the references there in, of interest?

Vegetation Limits City Warming Effects

August 26, 2015