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In the typical US city pavements can comprise one-third to two-fifths of
surface area
and in cities what we found is that you replaces nice naturally cool vegetation
with typically dark paved surfaces
and those dark surfaces are able to absorb a lot of sunlight very
effectively
and they later re-radiate that energy as heat
and so that causes cities to heat up quite a bit more than surrounding rural
and suburban areas
conventional pavements have typically and traditionally been made of asphalt
and this means that it's basically black rocks bound together by a black glue
so that's a lot of darkness that very effectively absorbs sunlight
cool pavements are paved surfaces that
are more effective at reflecting sunlight
so by reflecting more sunlight than traditional paved surfaces
they're able to absorb less heat from the sun and keep cities and communities cool.
Here berkeley lab we have a brand new parking lot that's been paved in
dark asphalt pavement
so we've teamed with industry partners to put down six cool pavement coatings
over sections of that lot
and a very in shade and color
and we intend it mostly as a demonstration so that we can show
visitors to lab that they're actually technologies and products for cool
pavements that are on the market and can be implemented in your home or city
What we're able to do is see the nice comparison between the temperatures that a hot
black surface can reach verses the nice relatively cooler temperatures of the
cool pavement
and so on a hot summer day we've seen temperature differences of about forty
degrees fahrenheit between the dark black asphalt pavement and any one of the
cool coatings
So we actually hosted a workshop here at Berkeley Labs intended primarily for
local government officials on the benefits of reflective pavement surfaces
and so this
helped educate them in a fairly technical way about the benefits that
could come from their implementation of cooler surfaces in their cities and
communities such as
decrease air temperature improved air quality and improved public health. These
are things that seem to have resonated pretty well and we're hopeful that this can
get the ball rolling on some local government action for cool pavement.