Abstract

Green infrastructures play an essential role in urban planning, namely with their potential to reduce the impact from air pollution episodes together with extreme weather events. This chapter focuses on the assessment of green infrastructures’ benefits on current and future microclimate and air quality patterns in Porto’s urban area (Portugal). The effects of green infrastructures on flow dynamics are evaluated for the baseline scenarios by means of numerical and physical simulations, using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model VADIS and the wind tunnel of the University of Aveiro. The baseline morphological (BM) scenario focuses on the current morphological characteristics of Porto’s urban area, while a baseline green (BG) scenario comprises the replacement of built-up areas by green areas and parks. In addition, the benefits of green infrastructures on air quality are assessed for the baseline and under future climate scenarios. The air quality simulations focus on particulate matter, one of the most critical air pollutants with severe impacts on human health. For the BM scenario, the simulated concentrations are compared with hourly averaged PM10 concentrations measured during a weekday at the air quality station located within the study domain.

Highlights

  • Despite the advances over the last decades on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, climate change still remains a major concern, threatening ecosystems and human systems [1–3]

  • Green infrastructures and urban forests play an essential role in urban planning, leading to several benefits to the environment as solutions of resilience to climate change and to improve air quality and thermal comfort [7–11]

  • Pollutant DISpersion in the atmosphere under VAriable wind conditions (VADIS) is the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model applied to Porto urban area to assess local-scale flow dynamics and air quality

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Summary

Introduction

Despite the advances over the last decades on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, climate change still remains a major concern, threatening ecosystems and human systems [1–3]. The chapter’s main objective is to evaluate the impact of distinct resilience measures on the urban microclimate and air quality, in recent past, current and future climate scenarios for Porto’s urban area. These resilience measures will be based on green infrastructures

From global to urban scale
CFD numerical formulation
Turbulent flow dynamics
Pollutant dispersion over complex geometries
Case study
Computational domain
Emissions from road traffic
Meteorological inflow boundary conditions
Meteorological data for recent past and future medium-term climate
Assessment of CFD performance
Assessment of GI effects on particulate matter dispersion
Impact of GI
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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