Flooded metro helps sizzling Tokyo cool off

[Dover]

Flooded metro helps sizzling Tokyo cool off
09:30 13 August 2005

AS ONCE temperate Tokyo slogs its way through another sweltering summer, the city is desperate to cool its streets. Now the capital has turned to the neglected custom of uchimizu - sprinkling water on the ground to lower air temperature - but with a high-tech twist.

This latest attempt to bring down summer temperatures that have been hovering in the 40s Celsius involves pumping up the water that seeps into the metro system and spraying it from the kerbside onto the road surface. A water-retentive coating stops the water from draining away, and evaporation does the rest.

At the test site, directly outside Japan's parliament building in central Tokyo, a solar and wind-powered pump forces the subway flood water into high-pressure sprinklers that spray it over a 350-metre stretch of road. Recently, the researchers managed to cool the road surface - which often reaches up to 60 °C during the summer - by 10 °C, and the air above the road by 1 °C.

Japan longs to return to the cooler summers that were the norm decades ago. Outpacing global warming by a factor of four, average temperatures in Tokyo alone have risen 3 °C in the past 100 years...cont'd

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7843

[progressivebydesign]

1. Part of that warming is also the massive buildings..

I mean, the less and less vegetation and more and more concrete and buildings, you are bound to heat things up. Add global warming to it.. ugh. I can't imagine being somewhere hot with all those people jammed in there. Not my idea of a good time.

[nookiemonster]

6. "Urban heat islands"

http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa121500a.htm

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. (scratches head) Tokyo has never had truly "cool" summers

It's notorious for being muggy and in the high 80s, low 90s from mid-July through September. That's how it was when I first went there 28 years ago and on every return visit since then.

The Tokyo area is warmer than it used to be, but it probably hasn't had "cool" summers since the last Ice Age.

[Art_from_Ark]

7. Well, Tokyo DID have a fairly cool summer a couple of years ago

but that is definitely the exception. Looking out from the 25th floor of my office building, I can see the quintessential "concrete jungle" that is Tokyo-- buildings and asphalt as far as the eye can see, with the curious exception of the Imperial Palace grounds and what appears to be the Yasukuni Shrine off in the distance. With so much asphalt and so many buildings packed together (and lots of high rises have been going up these days, too), you've got the ingredients for one heck of a heat island.

[oscar111]

3. air only 2 degrees Farenheit cooler{=1Celcius}?

not much cooling. The increased humidity would cancel the "felt" coolness to human bodies.

we need "orbiting sunshades". Google that for CBS news page.. many schemes for quick-cooling the planet.

Kyoto too slow, if ever. Nations break pledges. Nations never join. Nations hate shutting down factories. Just wont work

Like real solutions? Total solutions?

time to get it done! Orbiting sunshades would also hire some of our jobless tekkies.

Would cool the tropics below 1900 levels, if you do sunshades with vigor. May's nice weather all summer long. Nice. Dance around the maypole.

[oscar111]

4. ORBITING SUNSHADES needed, not weak fountain effects

see my re just above this one

[Porcupine]

5. There are these things called trees....

that do a great job of cooling things down here in Californias central valley. We regularly have days over 100 and they do a fine job.