The use of reflective materials as a strategy for urban cooling in an arid “OASIS” city

Latin American cities are expanding in a discontinuous and scattered manner that is not sustainable. This urban growth increases the percentage of sealed surfaces, favoring the formation of urban heat island. This study evaluates how reflective materials of the urban envelope modify air temperatures in an urban sector of the metropolitan area of Mendoza, Argentina. The goal is to analyze the effect of this strategy on different morphologies and urban forest percentages. For these propose, 18 scenarios were simulated with ENVI-met 3.1 software. The results show that every 10% increase of albedo on horizontal surfaces decreases the outside air temperature by 0.75 °C. For high density scenarios, every 10% increase of albedo on vertical surfaces increases the air temperature by 0.5 °C. For buildings that are more than 12 m high, the albedo of the facades should be less than 0.50 in order to decrease external temperatures. In all scenarios, increasing the albedo of building envelopes raises the mean radiant temperature.