Geology Question
You need to redesign a building and its surrounding landscape or conceive a new building design. This could be a college building, house, or other structure. We could use our climate region here or another climate type. We might consider the sustainability of the building, its demands for energy or water, waste materials, the carbon budget, or other characteristics of the design.
A drawing and labeling would be an ideal presentation to share. Use of terms like transmission, albedo, latent heat, evaporation, and longwave radiation are desirable.
Energy background
Most of the sun’s radiation is short wave (light). When this short wave radiation is transmitted through the earth’s atmosphere and reaches the earth’s surface, it is either reflected as short wave, or absorbed and preferentially reradiated as long wave energy (heat). The amount of short wave energy reflected is albedo, expressed as a percentage. Albedo is a function of color and surface texture, e.g., clean snow may be 90-95%, concrete about 17-27%, and asphalt about 5-10%. Water varies from 10-60% based on the angle of insolation and surface roughness. The average albedo of the earth is about 31%.
As we have noted in our analysis of the atmosphere, long wave radiation moving by conduction, convection, and radiation may be trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane.
Our energy budget may be affected by latent heat, stored by a phase change, e.g., it takes energy to evaporate water and this energy is released when the water condenses. Mist-producing devices in public places are typically cooling a surface by evaporation. Forests have an albedo of 10-20% but leaf surfaces do not typically heat up much because leaves transpire. Water is very effective in storing energy because of its high heat capacity. Short wave radiation may be absorbed into the surface of something like a brick, while short wave radiation may be absorbed to a depth of many feet in water.