Landscape Experiment

The Occidental Landscape is a very interesting one, filled with many different buildings, pathways, and carefully kept landscape. To measure the heat island effect, the Landscape team planned to perform an experiment that measured the heat of different surfaces around campus. For example, we planned to take the temperature of areas that had the three major types of landscape on campus in close proximity to each other like the area near the Tiger Cooler, as well as other major areas on campus for example the large cement area between Johnson and Fowler Academic Halls or near the Oak Trees in the Academic Quad. We hypothesized that the cement and other hardscape around campus would retain more heat for longer than the other surfaces. Grassy areas and hardscape alternatives would offer less heat retaining and more environmentally friendly surfaces that are also aesthetically pleasing.

Due to unforeseen weather conditions that prevented us from taking measurements with any hope of a precise result, we decided to delay the experiment. However, if the weather had obliged, we would have proceeded to do several things to prepare for the project. We would have used scientific thermocouples to measure the temperatures of the different areas. Measurements would have been taken at about waist height at the same time each day, for a few days in a row to ensure an accurate reading. The measurements would then have been given to the Statistics class which had agreed to work with us on our project so that they could correlate and interpret the data that we had gathered. Using this method would enable us to discover the average temperature of the most common surfaces around the Occidental Campus and hopefully demonstrate the results of the heat island effect.