Potencial de redução da temperatura de superfície pelo aumento do albedo nas diversas regiões brasileiras

Abstract

Urban growth progressively replaces green areas by building materials, which absorb more solar radiation and retain heat, altering urban microclimate and increasing urban heat island effect and therefore causing discomfort in hotter regions and during summer, with increase energy consumption for HVAC systems. A strategy for reducing surface temperature is to adopt surface materials with higher albedo. Once surface temperature results of both incident energy and albedo, the objective here was generate a Global Horizontal Irradiation (GHR) Map of the Brazilian territory in order to estimate the potential cooling effect of increasing albedo in several regions, serving as guide to decide where albedo increase would be useful, and how much would be its cooling effect. The methodology adopted was to calculate the average GHR using the database created by Prof.MaurícioRoriz, with hourly data of 411 cities from INMET weather stations, between 2000 and 2010. The cooling potential effect was calculated from an empirical relationship presented in the area literature. The results were converted into a thematic map, using the kriging method for interpolating the data sample. In the generated maps larger variations can be noticed in the cooling potential from region to region, noticeable even for same latitudes.