STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF SOIL MOISTURE LEVEL ON SURFACE TEMPERATURE REDUCTION CAPABILITY

Abstract

In Singapore, the continuous efforts in making the country a “garden city” has resulted in lush greenery throughout the island. Currently roof garden (RG) has been widely accepted from building developer as it increases the value of the building. With the introduction of vertical greenery (VG) into Singapore, the Shimizu’s Parabienta system has been selected and installed in National University of Singapre (NUS), Greenery Technologies Laboratory (GTL) to pilot test the system. Incorporating VG with RG would indefinitely help to reduce the surface temperature further. In this paper, the objective was to investigate the impact of moisture content on the reduction capability of surface temperature. To fulfill the objective, field measurements and data analysis was conducted on various locations within the system itself. The system was divided into 3 different types of water supply, maximum, medium and no water supply. The system was then supplied with different amount of water for 6 days. Soil moisture data was also collected and compared with the surface temperature to see if there are any linkages between the two. Results have revealed that soil moisture does have an impact on the surface temperature reduction capability. It is further shown that increase moisture level does not necessarily correlated to higher amount of temperature reduction. From the experiment, it has concluded that using the 2 minutes medium water supply system may be as good as using the 5 minutes medium water supply system.