Investigations of synoptic wind profile patterns in complex urban areas based on LiDAR measurements

Abstract

Accurately assessing the variations in wind profiles is very significant for wind engineering and atmospheric research. The complexity of topography poses challenges to accurately predicting wind profile patterns. To accurately evaluate the impact of the heterogeneity of the underlying urban surface and mountainous terrain on the synoptic wind profiles, the vertical profiles of synoptic winds below 1032 m in Shenzhen were investigated for six months based on a high-spatiotemporal-resolution light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system. Specifically, the wind speed and direction profile patterns were summarized and analyzed using a self-organizing map (SOM) clustering technique, considering all possible atmospheric stability conditions. The results indicate that SOMs are effective tools for extracting synoptic wind speed and direction profile patterns based on the sum of squared errors (SSE) and variance ratio criterion (VRC) values. Additionally, the heterogeneity of the underlying urban surface and mountainous terrain has considerable effects on the wind speed and direction profile patterns. The wind speed and wind direction profiles can be divided into three distinct categories. Due to the presence of mountainous terrain, gradient winds can rise to altitudes of approximately 800 m, causing the mean wind twist angles to exceed 45° at heights below 1 km. The maximum wind twist angles can reach 100°. Moreover, this study offers improved models for describing diverse wind speed and direction profile patterns. These models may be beneficial in future research and engineering applications.