Simulating the 3D Distribution of Absorbed Shortwave Radiation in a Tree Crown: Comparison of Simplified and Monte Carlo Models

Abstract

Urban trees are expected to alleviate severe thermal environments in summer. The absorbed shortwave radiation is a key variable to estimate the microclimatic effects of trees. In numerical simulation tools for the urban and built thermal environment, the difficulty lies in how to calculate the absorbed radiation in terms of accuracy and computational load. Here we investigated the difference between a radiative transfer model calculating scattering by the Monte Carlo method and a simpler model that accounts for scattering by modifying the optical depth. The calculations of absorbed radiation were performed under various conditions of leaf normal distribution and zenith angle of incident radiation, using tree models represented by voxels with different leaf area density values. For the photosynthetically active radiation, the relative difference between models was less than 10% for most cases. For the near‐infrared radiation, the difference was also small for a large canopy consisting of several trees. The difference was 30%–60% and 0%–20% for zenith angles of incident radiation of 0° and 60°, respectively, for small isolated trees with a crown height and width of less than 5 m, which was a significantly different condition from a uniform canopy. This large difference was related to the uniformity of the canopy and was explained by the transmittance from each voxel to the outside of the canopy. The present study enables us to evaluate the applicability of the simple model and correct the difference from the Monte Carlo model.