The influence of afforestation on decreasing pavement surface temperature in a humid equatorial climate

The avenue Leopoldo Machado is one of the main mobility routes of Macapá city, northern Brazil, because it connects the northern hemisphere with the southern hemisphere of the city, it presents inconstancy in the afforestation along its length, which makes it difficult for people to move around adequately. The present study focuses on analyzing the urban microclimate in the area, to understand the influence of the surface temperature of urban pavement on urban thermal comfort. It employed as a method, field measurements of soil temperature with an infrared thermometer on three types of materials and numerical simulations with ENVI-Met software to verify that in situ soil temperatures are reproduced by these simulations. The in loco results showed the influence of materials and afforestation on soil temperature, with a decrease of up to 23.8°C at points with higher tree density. The computational models simulated with Envi-met were successful in reproducing the observed values of soil temperature, which allows the use of this software to study the properties of various sidewalks together with various afforestation scenarios for cities with humid equatorial climate to mitigate the effects of urban warming.