Abstract
Modelling wind speeds in urban areas have many applications e.g. in relation to assessment of wind energy, modelling air pollution, and building design and engineering. Models for extrapolating the urban wind speed exist, but little attention has been paid to the influence of the upwind terrain and the foundations for the extrapolation schemes. To analyse the influence of the upwind terrain and the foundations for the extrapolation of the urban wind speed, measurements from six urban and non-urban stations were explored, and a model for the urban wind speed with and without upwind influence was developed and validated. The agreement between the wind directions at the stations is found to be good, and the influence of atmospheric stability, horizontal temperature gradients, land-sea breeze, temperature, global radiation and Monin-Obukhov Length is found to be small, although future work should explore if this is valid for other urban areas. Moreover, the model is found to perform reasonably well, but the upwind influence is overestimated. Areas of model improvement are thus identified. The upwind terrain thus influences the modelling of the urban wind speed to a large extent, and the fundamental assumptions for the extrapolation scheme are fulfilled for this specific case.
Highlights
The urban wind speed has been an area of research, as part of urban climatology studies, since the 1930s1
Financial and technical constraints prevent the use of measurements to assess the urban wind speed
The present study is motivated by the use of the modelled urban wind speed as input to regulatory air pollution models, since previous work[16,17] have shown the importance of this input
Summary
The urban wind speed has been an area of research, as part of urban climatology studies, since the 1930s1. The present study is motivated by the use of the modelled urban wind speed as input to regulatory air pollution models, since previous work[16,17] have shown the importance of this input. The same principles continue to guide the development of such models even today despite the evolution of high performance computing facilities This is the case, since the needs have evolved and increased as well, demanding longer and finer time scales and more and diverse receptor locations. In line with this approach, focus of the present study is on modelling hourly averaged wind speeds in the roughness sublayer (using the terminology of21), since this is the averaging time and relevant height used in regulatory air quality models
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