Meteorological, emissions and air-quality modeling of heat-island mitigation: recent findings for California, USA

There exists a number of environmental and energy measures that, when deployed at urban scale, can directly impact energy use and emissions from power generation and indirectly affect the atmospheric environment which, in turn, impacts energy demand, emissions of greenhouse gas and ozone precursors and photochemical production of ozone. Atmospheric modeling is an important tool in evaluating the indirect effects, both beneficial and inadvertent, of urban heat-island mitigation. In this article, we provide a brief background discussion of heat-island research and modeling and present findings from three recent projects we have completed for California.