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High-resolution urban modeling of NYC
Citation:
Pleim, J., Jerold Herwehe, AND R. Turnau. High-resolution urban modeling of NYC. AQAD-AESMD PL/PI monthly technical meeting, Durham, NC, August 17, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
The new method is introduced that accounts for realistic street canyon orientation in two directions. We also implemented and innovative way to combine the effects of the 2 street directions to result in model realistic winds in the building canopy layers
Description:
Human exposure to air pollution is especially acute in urban environments where there are higher emissions from vehicles and other sources. High concentrations often accumulate within the urban building canopy where ventilation is limited. While our air quality models (i.e., WRF-CMAQ and MPAS-CMAQ) can be applied with high resolution (~ 1km or finer grid cell dimension) they currently do not realistically model the effects of dense building canopies in core cities such as New York or Chicago. We are developing and appling a new efficient, realistic treatment of meteorology and air quality within dense urban building canopies which will be a new urban version of ACM2 PBL model and PX LSM in WRF that will be applied to both the WRF-CMAQ and MPAS-CMAQ coupled meteorology and air quality models. Detailed building data including plan area density, frontal area density and average building height is used to affect wind, temperature and humidity profiles. This new urban model is being initially developed through collaboration with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and applied to Hong Kong. In this project, the coupled urban WRF-CMAQ will be demonstrated at high resolution (0.444km) for New York City. The meterological results of the NYC application at 444m grid reolution have been evaluated and shown to be better than the base model and the BEP/BEM urbam model in WRF.