Quantifying evapotranspiration and shading cooling of urban vegetation across climates under extreme heat using an integrated SCOPE-SEB model and surface temperature analysis

Abstract

Urban vegetation mitigates heat through evapotranspiration (ET) and shading, and quantitatively characterizing these two pathways is essential for comparable cross-city assessment and for identifying climate-specific limiting factors. However, a standardized and physically based framework to quantify and compare these cooling effects across different cities and climatic contexts is still lacking. Existing metrics, such as evapotranspiration-induced cooling of vegetation (ECoV) and shading-induced cooling of vegetation (SCoV), are typically applied within individual cities. To address this, we developed a transferable framework that integrates a physically based Soil-Canopy-Observation of Pho..