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In arid environments such as Arizona, agricultural producers are burdened by constraints placed on them by inhospitable weather and limited access to water and fertile soil when attempting to grow produce. Farms in the arid Southwest often have to build greenhouses to overcome such constraints; however, such greenhouses may be relatively space, water, and pesticide intensive and often have demanding maintenance needs and overhead costs. In addition, many current agricultural practices exhaust land resources disparagingly, leading to irreversible environmental degradation. In an effort to improve agricultural production for those limited by weather and resource constraints while simultaneously increasing sustainability in land, resource and pesticide use, we have created Valleyponics, a hydroponic growth services company centered around creating a minimal farming footprint. The company uses a consultative services approach, leveraging NASA Veggie Growth System Technology to provide solutions to large businesses by automating their agricultural production processes and minimizing resource use year-round. Valleyponics aims to cultivate consultative partnerships which will allow our clients, their communities, and the environment to flourish.
Summer daytime cooling efficiency of various land cover is investigated for the urban core of Phoenix, Arizona, using the Local-Scale Urban Meteorological Parameterization Scheme (LUMPS). We examined the urban energy balance for 2 summer days in 2005 to analyze the daytime cooling-water use tradeoff and the timing of sensible heat reversal at night. The plausibility of the LUMPS model results was tested using remotely sensed surface temperatures from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) imagery and reference evapotranspiration values from a meteorological station. Cooling efficiency was derived from sensible and latent heat flux differences. The time when the sensible heat flux turns negative (sensible heat flux transition) was calculated from LUMPS simulated hourly fluxes. Results indicate that the time when the sensible heat flux changes direction at night is strongly influenced by the heat storage capacity of different land cover types and by the amount of vegetation. Higher heat storage delayed the transition up to 3 h in the study area, while vegetation expedited the sensible heat reversal by 2 h. Cooling efficiency index results suggest that overall, the Phoenix urban core is slightly more efficient at cooling than the desert, but efficiencies do not increase much with wet fractions higher than 20%. Industrial sites with high impervious surface cover and low wet fraction have negative cooling efficiencies. Findings indicate that drier neighborhoods with heterogeneous land uses are the most efficient landscapes in balancing cooling and water use in Phoenix. However, further factors such as energy use and human vulnerability to extreme heat have to be considered in the cooling-water use tradeoff, especially under the uncertainties of future climate change.