On the Variability of Atmospheric Transparency: Key Players, Geographic Specificities and Implications for Daytime Radiative Cooling

Dear Colleagues,

In about 30 years, the demand for cooling would be three to four-fold, accompanied by an unprecedented air conditioning penetration. To limit the environmental impact, passive and sustainable cooling systems are urgently needed. Daytime radiative cooling is the gold promise of passive cooling and refrigeration in the built environment. It exploits the atmospheric transparency in the so-called atmospheric window (8-13 μm) as a channel to reject heat directly into the outer space, thus reaching sub ambient temperatures even under peak irradiance when high mid-infrared emittance is combined with high solar reflectance. The potential against local climate change is extraordinary under ideal, desert-like conditions. However, any loss of atmospheric transparency, ascribable to humidity, clouds and pollutants, causes the downwelling longwave radiation to increase and the net radiative cooling to diminish, if not to disappear.

Despite being a well-acknowledged issue, a cohesive literature that tackles and quantifies the key variables and geographic variability behind the loss of atmospheric transparency is still missing, just like a well-established methodology to compute the corresponding radiative power loss.

In this framework, this Special Issue aims at publishing high-quality papers targeting the following goals:

• Collecting criteria and methods to quantify the atmospheric transparency loss as a function of the local atmospheric conditions, climate, geography and air quality;
• Establishing innovative monitoring systems to measure the atmospheric transparency and capture the key variables involved in the interaction between radiative cooler and atmosphere;
• Correlating the atmospheric transparency loss with observables at surface level and/or with the radiative cooling power impairment;
• Interpreting historical data to predict the potential loss of atmospheric transparency at local and global scale in future scenarios;
• Investigating methods to minimize the radiative cooling sensitivity to atmospheric transparency”.

Dr. Giulia Ulpiani
Dr. Chi Yan Tso
Dr. Yu-Bin Chen
Guest Editors

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