1981/01/01 by Toby N. Carlson, Joseph K. Dodd, Stanley G. Benjamin +1 · 310 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · #Atmospheric sciences #Boundary layer #Building Energy and Comfort Optimization #Daytime #Dryness #Energy balance #Environmental science #Evaporation #Flux (metallurgy) #Geography #Geology #Heat flux #Heat transfer #Humidity #Latent heat #Materials science #Mechanics #Meteorology #Moisture #Planetary boundary layer #Satellite #Sensible heat #Turbulence #Urban Heat Island Mitigation #Urban heat island #Vegetation (pathology) #Wind and Air Flow Studies
paper · doi:10.1175/1520-0450(1981)020<0067:seotse>2.0.co;2
published in Journal of applied meteorology 20(1), 67-87 (American Meteorological Society)
openalex publication_date 1981/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
A method for inferring the distribution of surface heat and evaporative fluxes and the ground moisture availability and thermal inertia (ground conductive capacity) is used to analyze two urbanized areas, Los Angeles and St. Louis. The technique employs infrared satellite temperature measurements in conjunction with a one-dimensional boundary-layer model. Results show that there is a marked reduction of evaporation and moisture availability and a corresponding elevation of sensible heat flux over urbanized areas and over cropped areas with low vegetative cover. Conversely, low heat flux and high evaporation characterize vegetated and, especially, forested areas. Warm urban centers appear directly related to a reduction in vegetation, which normally allows for a greater fraction of available radiant energy to be converted into latent heat flux. The distribution of thermal inertia was surprisingly ill-defined and its variation between urban and rural areas was quite small. Thus, the increased heat storage within the urban fabric, which has been proposed as the underlying cause of the nocturnal heat island, may be caused mainly by enhanced daytime surface heating which occurs because of surface dryness, rather than by large spatial variations in the conductivity of the surface.