TLDR: LA suffers from "heat island" effect, so to lower the temperature at the street level they're coating streets with a sealant. The company that manufactures the sealant previously developed sealants for the military.
Absolutely correct, except for this part of the article:
"Luzar said the officials were interested in lowering the temperature of taxiways so that aircraft would be less easily seen by spy satellites using infrared cameras, which form images using thermal energy."
Before I clicked on the article I was trying to figure out how coating a city's streets would somehow prevent spy planes from being seen. I didn't even want to try and crack why this might be necessary.
“We found that on average the area covered in CoolSeal is 10 degrees cooler than black asphalt on the same parking lot,” Spotts said. “We thought it was really interesting. It’s almost like treated asphalt warms at a lower rate.”
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadThey're becoming the new forbes.
TLDR: LA suffers from "heat island" effect, so to lower the temperature at the street level they're coating streets with a sealant. The company that manufactures the sealant previously developed sealants for the military.
"Luzar said the officials were interested in lowering the temperature of taxiways so that aircraft would be less easily seen by spy satellites using infrared cameras, which form images using thermal energy."
Before I clicked on the article I was trying to figure out how coating a city's streets would somehow prevent spy planes from being seen. I didn't even want to try and crack why this might be necessary.
For sensational titles, I'm developing a habit of checking the comments first. It seems to be working :).
Um, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
It's a pity that glass mirrors make for a crappy road surface otherwise they might try that :)