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A COMPARISON OF AIRFLOW PATTERNS FROM THE QUIC MODEL AND AN ATMOSPHERIC WIND TUNNEL FOR A TWO-DIMENSIONAL BUILDING ARRAY AND A MULTI-CITY BLOCK REGION NEAR THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE
Citation:
Bowker, G, S G. Perry, AND D K. Heist. A COMPARISON OF AIRFLOW PATTERNS FROM THE QUIC MODEL AND AN ATMOSPHERIC WIND TUNNEL FOR A TWO-DIMENSIONAL BUILDING ARRAY AND A MULTI-CITY BLOCK REGION NEAR THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE. Presented at 5th Symposium on the Urban Environment, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 23-27, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to develop and evaluate numerical and physical modeling tools for simulating ground-level concentrations of airborne substances in urban settings at spatial scales ranging from ~1-10 km. These tools will support client needs in the areas of air toxics and homeland security. The air toxics tools will benefit the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) program and human exposure modeling needs within EPA. The homeland security-related portion of this task will help in developing tools to assess the threat posed by the release of airborne agents. Both sets of tools will consider the effects induced by urban morphology on fine-scale concentration distributions.
Description:
Dispersion of pollutants in densely populated urban areas is a research area of clear importance. Currently, few numerical tools exist capable of describing airflow and dispersion patterns in these complex regions in a time efficient manner. (QUIC), Quick Urban & Industrial Complex, a fast-running flow and dispersion simulation program has shown promise is this area. QUIC flow patterns were compared against two wind tunnel data sets, namely: one for a simple two-dimensional building array; another for a complex group of buildings surrounding the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. In both cases QUIC satisfactorily simulated the flow patterns depicting channeling and recirculation patterns within particular street canyons.
This paper has been reviewed in accordance with the United States Environmental Protection Agency's peer and administrative review policies and approved for presentation and publication.