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Near Source Modeling: Building Downwash and Roadside Barriers
Citation:
Heist, D., V. Isakov, R. Baldauf, AND S. Perry. Near Source Modeling: Building Downwash and Roadside Barriers. UK-US Collaboration Meeting, RTP, NC, October 26 - 27, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Presentation related to buidling downwash in AERMOD.
Description:
Knowing the fate of effluent from an industrial stack is important for assessing its impact on human health. AERMOD is one of several Gaussian plume models containing algorithms to evaluate the effect of buildings on the movement of the effluent from a stack. The goal of this study is to improve AERMOD’s ability to accurately model important and complex building downwash scenarios by incorporating knowledge gained from a recently completed series of wind tunnel studies and complementary large eddy simulations of flow and dispersion around simple structures for a variety of building dimensions, stack locations, stack heights, and wind angles. This study presents three modifications to the building downwash algorithm in AERMOD that improve the physical basis and internal consistency of the model, and one modification to AERMOD’s building pre-processor to better represent elongated buildings in oblique winds. These modifications are demonstrated to improve the ability of AERMOD to model observed ground-level concentrations in the vicinity of a building for the variety of conditions examined in the wind tunnel and numerical studies. In addition, recent research on the effect of roadside barriers on dispersion of traffic-related pollutants is presented.