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white roofs

10.09.2010

In 1820, Luke Howard, an English amateur meteorologist, first noted that it was always a little warmer in a big city than in the surrounding countryside (by the way, he also introduced the cloud classification that is still used today). City pavements and roofs bask in the sun more than natural greenery, and they heat up the air of the city.

An employee of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (USA) Keith Olson suggests painting the roofs of buildings white. Computer simulations showed that if all the roofs of city houses were painted with white, the difference between temperatures in the city and outside the city would be reduced by a third. The effect will be expressed mainly in summer, mainly for cities in the middle and southern latitudes.

In New York, such a measure would reduce the summer temperature by one degree Celsius. Unfortunately, it is hardly possible to paint the asphalt on the streets white.

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The US Army has begun the final phase of developing microchip prototypes that will make the US Army resilient to the loss of the GPS navigation system. The threat of losing situational awareness and the ability to deliver precision strikes in the absence of GPS has long worried the US military. At the same time, for most countries, failures in the operation of GPS are the only hope to provide at least some effective resistance to the high-tech military machine of the United States.

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