Human Geography Commons^™

Spatial Configuration And Time Of Day Impact The Magnitude Of Urban Tree Canopy Cooling, Miguel Alonzo, Matthew Baker, Yuemeng Gao, Vivek Shandas

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Tree cover is generally associated with cooler air temperatures in urban environments but the roles of canopy configuration, spatial context, and time of day are not well understood. The ability to examine spatiotemporal relationships between trees and urban climate has been hindered by lack of appropriate air temperature data and, perhaps, by overreliance on a single ‘tree canopy’ class, obscuring the mechanisms by which canopy cools. Here, we use >70 000 air temperature measurements collected by car throughout Washington, DC, USA in predawn (pd), afternoon (aft), and evening (eve) campaigns on a hot summer day. We subdivided tree canopy into …