Hello dear Natcap community,
I’m currently using the Urban cooling model and I’m uncertain how blue spaces/water bodies should be treated in the biophysical table.
I’m modeling a city on a river island.
In my biophysical table, for “green_area”, I’ve choose to give a value of 0 for water bodies and ponds surrounding the city or on the island.
Looking at the result, all the water bodies have a low HMI which doesn’t seem to be a realistic result.
I would like to use a value of 1 but I’m wondering if it’s scientifically rigorous.
I quickly looked in the scientific literature. I’ve found this article:
Hu, Yanxia, Changqing Wang, and Jingjing Li. “Assessment of Heat Mitigation Services Provided by Blue and Green Spaces: An Application of the InVEST Urban Cooling Model with Scenario Analysis in Wuhan, China.” Land 12.5 (2023): 963.
In their biophysical table, they gave a value of 0 or 1, for “green_area” and wrote in their article :
“Secondly, the InVEST UCM only considers the cooling benefits of green space. To avoid such limitations, we evaluated the cooling effect of evaporation from water bodies when using the model in this study. We observed a certain degree of improvement in the correlation between simulated HMI and LST when water bodies were incorporated into the cooling function.”
So, is it ok to give a value of 1 for “green_area” for waterbodies?
Thanks in advance for you answer 