Using Snow Melting Pipes to Verify the Water Sprinkling's Effect over a Wide Area L'usage estival des réseaux d'aspersion servant à la fonte du verglas dans les villes soumises à des précipitations neigeuses

It is becoming most urgent to find solutions for the heat island phenomenon as it grows into a bigger problem in many cities in Japan. “Water sprinkling” is getting noticed as a possible countermeasure for this problem in Japan, but a quantitative analysis of its effectiveness has yet to be made. Therefore, an experiment using the “snow melting pipe” infrastructures in Japan’s snowy areas was conducted to verify if the air temperature actually decreased at a city level by conducting water sprinkling. It was found that when the temperature was over 30°C, a temperature decrease of approximately 2°C in the morning and a decrease of approximately 4°C in the afternoon were recorded. We can deduce from these results that water sprinkling is a viable and effective countermeasure to the heat island phenomenon, and using snow melting pipes which allow automatic water sprinkling is a very efficient method.