Report on Land Use and Albedo of Suffolk County

Suffolk County is a county in Long Island, New York; it is next to Nassau County. Suffolk County contains about 911 square miles and is home to approximately 1.4 million people. It is comprised of ten towns: Southhampton, Shelter Island, Southhold, Riverhead, East Hampton, Brookhaven, Smithtown, Huntington, Islip, and Babylon. There are also 31 villages and 71 school districts established in the Suffolk County. The amount of currently available data are limited to Eastern Suffolk County.             Eastern Suffolk County includes five towns: Riverhead; Southhold, Shelter Island, Southhampton, and East Hampton.  According to the document, 1999 Existing Land Use Inventory, about 57 percent of those east end towns' acreage is used for Recreation and Open Space, Agriculture, and Vacant. About three fourths of agricultural acreage is placed in North Fork, and three fourths acreage for recreation and open space, and vacant property are placed in South Fork. Residential development, as a whole, uses 27 percent of the east end acreage.  Commercial, industrial, and institutional uses comprise about 2 percent of the east end acreage respectively. Transportational use comprises 8 percent of the acreage. 

          One of my tasks is to calculate the albedo of each of those land uses. The term albedo is defined as the average reflection coefficient of an object. It basically is a unitless measurement used to present how well an object reflects light. The albedo will affect the equilibrium temperature of the Earth. Global warming is the result of the lowering of the albedo, as more and more infrared radiation is trapped. 

              The method of calculating the albedo of each of the land use is multiplying the percent of area of the particular land use with the average albedo. For example, since the high density residential area comprises 1 percent of the area acreage, and high density residential area is  mainly composed of new concrete, which has albedo 0.55, and green grass, which has albedo 0.25; thus, the albedo for residential use is 1% * [ (.55 + .25) / 2 ] = .004. Commercial, industrial, and institutional uses are all belong to the urban area, which has albedo number approximately 0.2, those area must have also contained new concrete. Agricultural area is composed of soil, which has the albedo 0.3 and crops, which has the albedo 0.25. Albedo for transportational use is probably the same as for commercial area.  Recreation and open space and vacant are comprised of forest with albedo 0.1, sand with albedo 0.4, bare soil with albedo 0.17, and green grass with albedo 0.25. The above data are organized as following:

Ordinary Average = Total Weighted Average (percent) / Total Area (percent) = .2736 / 100% = .2736

The final result, the ordinary average of land use of Suffolk County, is .2736.