rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] "In Greenland, an Urban Heat Island Is Growing Fast" (Reply)

Sarah Goodyear's article at The Atlantic Cities about the fast-growing impact of Greenland's capital city of Nuuk, on the natural and human environments, is fascinating. One thing that Goodyear recounts is that for Greenlanders, their fast-growing city is a liberating thing, an increasingly relatively desirable habitat for Greenlanders that lets them connect with the outside world.

[F]or all our new familiarity with the idea of Greenland as a global climatological force, we don’t often think about it as a place where people live. With only 56,000 souls living on 836,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country in the world. Most residents are concentrated in a few cities and towns on the island’s western edge. Some 16,000 live in the capital city of Nuuk.

And Nuuk, like cities around the world, is an urban heat island, according to research conducted by Tony Reames, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration.

Reames, whose studies have focused on environmental justice in urban America, began his research as a class project, not sure what he would find. But the almost laboratory-like conditions of Greenland, he discovered, were a perfect place to measure the effect of human urban development on temperature, especially in the dark winter months.

“You don’t have solar influences at all,” says Reames. “It’s a unique situation to observe the human activity impact.”

He looked at data from 2005 to 2011, and found a strong urban heat island effect in the winter months. In 2011, for instance, the urban area of Nuuk registered temperatures on average 0.5 degrees Centigrade warmer than the surrounding area. February temperatures were 1.1 degrees Centigrade higher than in the surrounding areas, an effect that Reames says is attributable to the intense demands of the heating season and to energy-inefficient buildings that radiate much of that heat into the atmosphere.