Home▸Climate, Ecology & Environment▸Cool Roofs, Cool Pavements, and Green Cover: Engineering Urban Heat Mitigation

🌆 Cool Roofs, Cool Pavements, and Green Cover

A quantitative look at how cities size high-albedo surfaces, tree canopy, and irrigation budgets to physically cut peak street temperatures during heatwaves.

Climate, Ecology & Environment3DAdvanced60 FPS

A 3D city block where every rooftop and street tile is colored live by a simplified surface-energy-balance model, so you can see how albedo, tree shade, and time of day physically drive peak urban temperatures.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Surface temperature is modeled as air temperature plus a solar gain scaled by (1 − albedo), minus a shade discount from nearby tree canopy — the same first-order physics that drives real cool-roof and cool-pavement retrofits.

🎮 How to Use

Drag the cool-roof, cool-pavement, and tree-canopy sliders to retrofit the city, then scrub time of day to watch the sun move and surfaces heat and cool in real time. Watch the peak street temperature and heat-mitigated stats respond.

💡 Did You Know?

Standard black bitumen roofing (albedo ≈ 0.2) can sit 30°C above air temperature at peak sun; certified cool roofs with albedo above 0.6 can cut that gain by more than half.

⚙ Under the hood

A quantitative look at how cities size high-albedo surfaces, tree canopy, and irrigation budgets to physically cut peak street temperatures during heatwaves.

urban heat islandsurface reflectivitytemperature modelinggreen infrastructureheatwavescity planningThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install