Mow, mow, mow your lawn if you still have one

To address the recent drought in California, policymakers have created incentives for homeowners to replace existing lawns with drought tolerant vegetation. However, new research from George Ban-Weiss, an assistant professor in the Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says differently Theysay that  these efforts might have some hidden consequences on local climate.

Ban-Weiss and post-doctoral scholar Pouya Vahmani used a model of the Los Angeles basin to investigate the climate impacts of widespread adoption of drought tolerant vegetation.

Their findings, put forth in the article “Climatic Consequences of Adopting Drought Tolerant Vegetation over Los Angeles as a Response to the California Drought” in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, indicate important findings.

Such as,  that in fact, if all lawns were replaced with drought tolerant vegetation, that Angelenos could expect an average daytime warming of 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit due largely to decreased evaporative cooling, as irrigation is stopped. For the hottest regions of the Los Angeles basin, such as the inland empire and San Fernando valley, the researchers predict a daytime increase in temperature of 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Such temperature increases could exacerbate heatwaves, increase photochemical smog production, and increase air conditioning energy use.

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Firenze Sage:   More evidence that the global warming crowd has no idea what they are talking about.