HR: 15:30h
AN: U23A-07 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Building-Scale Atmospheric Modeling for Understanding and Anticipating Environmental Risks to Urban Populations
AU: * Warner, T T
EM: warner@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, United States
AU: Swerdlin, S P
EM: swerdlin@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, United States
AU: Chen, F
EM: feichen@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, United States
AU: Hayden, M
EM: mhayden@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000, United States
AB: The innovative use of Computational Fluid-Dynamics (CFD) models to define the building- and street-scale atmospheric environment in urban areas can benefit society in a number of ways. Design criteria used by architectural climatologists, who help plan the livable cities of the future, require information about air movement within street canyons for different seasons and weather regimes. Understanding indoor urban air- quality problems and their mitigation, especially for older buildings, requires data on air movement and associated dynamic pressures near buildings. Learning how heat waves and anthropogenic forcing in cities collectively affect the health of vulnerable residents is a problem in building thermodynamics, human behavior, and neighborhood-scale and street-canyon-scale atmospheric sciences. And, predicting the movement of plumes of hazardous material released in urban industrial or transportation accidents requires detailed information about vertical and horizontal air motions in the street canyons. These challenges are closer to being addressed because of advances in CFD modeling, the coupling of CFD models with models of indoor air motion and air quality, and the coupling of CFD models with mesoscale weather-prediction models. This paper will review some of the new knowledge and technologies that are being developed to meet these atmospheric-environment needs of our growing urban populations.
DE: 3307 Boundary layer processes
DE: 3322 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1631, 1843)
DE: 3355 Regional modeling
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2009 Joint Assembly