CFD assisted method for locating and processing data from wind monitoring systems in forested mountainous regions

Abstract

Although the number of weather stations in the Republic of Korea that are located in mountainous regions has been increasing to provide better information of the weather in the mountains and aid effective predictions of disasters such as fires, landslides, and the dispersion of pollutants or airborne viruses, there is no standard method to aid the location of weather stations in mountainous regions. This study aims to develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to suggest a method for the proper installation of a wind monitoring system in a forested mountainous region. The inertial resistance coefficients of the canopy of coniferous and deciduous trees were measured through field experiments to simulate the wind environment in a mountainous region by considering the air resistance of trees. The averaged coefficients of the inertial resistance of coniferous and deciduous trees were 0.768 and 0.712 m-1, respectively. The developed open-source CFD model was validated using the measured field experiment data. The economic mesh size and a proper turbulence model were a 6.25 m and a standard k–e turbulence model to simulate the wind environment in the selected forested mountainous region. Using the validated CFD model, the wind environments were analysed according to various environmental conditions, such as air resistance of trees, tree height, and diameter of the clear-cut, and a proper installation method for the mountain meteorological observation system to observe the wind was proposed based on the simulated results.