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Tools
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Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST)
MIST is a
software tool that estimates the impacts of urban heat island
mitigation strategies on urban air temperatures, ozone, and
energy consumption
. The cooling strategies assessed include increasing
urban albedo (reflectance), increasing urban vegetative
cover, or a combination of both. Alternatively, users can
evaluate how a particular temperature change will impact
ozone concentrations and energy use. The basic steps involved
in running MIST are: (1) select the city to model, (2) define
the mitigation strategy to test, and (3) estimate impacts on
meteorology, air quality, and energy. All the data necessary
to run MIST exists for over 240 cities.
The Mitigation Impact Screening Tool (MIST) is intended to provide qualitatively accurate assessments of the likely impacts of heat island mitigation strategies averaged at the city-scale. All results presented in this tool were obtained using state-of-the-science modeling tools. Nevertheless, the required assumptions and approximations dictate that the results presented are qualitative in nature. MIST is therefore a screening tool and not intended to be used for regulatory decision making.
The Heat Island Mitigation Strategies Guidebook
The Heat Island Mitigation Strategies Guidebook will be available online in 2007 on this Web site. A description of the Guidebook is available.
Heat Island Actions Database
This database of projects and programs lists many examples of cost effective steps that communities can take to reduce the impacts of urban heat islands.
The Excessive Heat Events Guidebook
The Excessive Heat
Events Guidebook (PDF) (60 pp, 1.7MB) is designed to
help officials plan for and respond to excessive heat events.
The guidebook highlights best practices that have been
employed to save lives during excessive heat events in
different urban areas, and provides a menu of options that
officials can use to respond to these events in their
communities.