Los Angeles County's Department of Public Works, in 2019, applied a solar-reflective coating on roads in an area covering 0.64 km² of Covina, California, in order to determine whether a cooling effect could be achieved using a simple paving technology. As Ko and colleagues later reported in Environmental Research Letters, the surface temperature fell by as much as 9°F (5°C), but after ten months of weathering and vehicle traffic, that cooling effect had weakened by 1.8°F. A more recent, larger experiment in the Pacoima neighborhood has also provided useful data on the method’s practicality.
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