Daytime radiative cooling under extreme weather conditions

Radiative cooling, taking advantage of the coldness of the sky, has a potential to be a sustainable alternative to meet cooling needs. The performance of a radiative cooling device is fundamentally limited by the emissivity of the sky, therefore depends heavily on the regional weather conditions. Although the sky emissivity is known to increase with the dew point temperature, this interdependence relates only to clear skies and does not cover extreme weather conditions. Therefore, the feasibility of radiative cooling remains elusive in the equatorial tropical climate. A case study of Singapore is presented where the weather is humid, cloudy and constantly changing. We point out that a high degree of thermal insulation of the radiative cooling system can be effective under such extreme weather conditions. A new method to characterise dynamic sky conditions is presented, namely to measure the sky window emissivity in the zenith direction. We show that a sub-ambient cooling up to 8 °C is possible during daytime and that the cloud base is not a complete blackbody and can be used as a heat sink for radiative cooling.