To respond to phenomena such as heat waves, cold spells, and wind hazards that are becoming increasingly severe and frequent in densely populated urban areas, a method is needed that can accurately and quickly compute high-resolution urban wind and te...
To respond to phenomena such as heat waves, cold spells, and wind hazards that are becoming increasingly severe and frequent in densely populated urban areas, a method is needed that can accurately and quickly compute high-resolution urban wind and temperature information using realistic background conditions. To this end, this study develops a physics-based approach that reconstructs high-resolution urban meteorological fields—wind and air temperature—by combining mesoscale weather prediction outputs with structural information on complex terrain and buildings. The results of the meteorological field generation methods developed here are verified against observations collected in urban areas, and the accuracy–cost balance relative to the LDAPS−CFD coupled model is quantitatively assessed.
Chapter 1 outlines the need for high-resolution meteorological information for urban areas, limitations of existing studies, the objectives and rationale of this work, and an overview of each chapter. Chapter 2 describes the CFD model, LDAPS, and the LDAPS-CFD coupling system used throughout the study. Chapter 3 develops and proposes a framework for producing high-resolution urban wind-speed information using urban-form parameters (building volume ratio, plane area ratio, averaged building height) and the wind-speed change rate conditioned on inflow wind direction. Chapter 4 presents SOFT CUBE, which synthesizes three-dimensional wind and temperature fields by selecting, interpolating, and synthesizing entries from a database precomputed with a CFD model, using mesoscale weather prediction results for scenarios of wind-speed class, wind direction, and land-cover-dependent surface heating as decision variables, and evaluates its performance. Chapter 5 introduces and evaluates e-SOFT CUBE, which extends SOFT CUBE by tiling a wider urban area, constructing and synthesizing a database for each tile, and merging the sub-domain meteorological syntheses. Chapter 6 summarizes and integrates the results of the meteorological field generation methods presented in this work.
This paper is expected to show that three-dimensional weather information suitable for urban environmental assessment and city-operations decision-making can be provided rapidly through a new high-resolution field-generation technique linked to a mesoscale weather prediction system widely used in forecasting, suggesting the potential for real-time or near-real-time urban environmental information services.