The urban heat island Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST)

A web-based screening tool has been developed to assist urban planners and air quality management officials in assessing the potential of urban heat island mitigation strategies to affect the urban climate, ozone air quality, and energy consumption within their cities. The user of the screening tool can select from any of over 200 US cities for which to conduct the analysis. The mitigation strategies investigated include highly reflective (high albedo) construction and paving materials and urban vegetation. The user can test a range of albedo scenarios, vegetation scenarios, or combined scenarios. In addition users can simply specify a nominal urban air temperature reduction associated with some undetermined set of mitigation actions. The mitigation impact screening tool (MIST) then extrapolates results from a set of detailed meteorological model simulations for 20 cities across the US. These meteorological impacts are combined with energy and ozone impact models to estimate the impact that the specified mitigation action may have on the selected city. The results presented by MIST include a high degree of uncertainty and are intended only as a first-order estimate that urban planners can use to assess the viability of heat island mitigation strategies for their city.