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Numerical Analysis of the Atmospheric Boundary-Layer Turbulence Influence on Microscale Transport of Pollutant in an Idealized Urban Environment

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Abstract

The mesoscale atmospheric model Meso-NH is used to investigate the influence of mesoscale atmospheric turbulence on the mean flow, turbulence, and pollutant dispersion in an idealized urban-like environment, the array of containers investigated during the Mock Urban Setting Test field experiment. First, large-eddy simulations are performed as in typical computational fluid dynamics-like configurations, i.e., without accounting for the atmospheric- boundary-layer (ABL) turbulence on scales larger than the building scale. Second, in a multiscale configuration, turbulence of all scales prevailing in the ABL is accounted for by using the grid-nesting approach to downscale from the mesoscale to the microscale. The building-like obstacles are represented using the immersed boundary method and a new turbulence recycling method is used to enhance the turbulence transition between two nested domains. Upstream of the container array, flow characteristics such as wind speed, direction and turbulence kinetic energy are well reproduced with the multiscale configuration, showing the efficiency of the grid-nesting approach in combination with turbulence recycling for downscaling from the mesoscale to the microscale. Only the multiscale configuration is able to reproduce the mesoscale turbulent structures crossing the container array. The accuracy of the numerical results is evaluated for wind speed, wind direction, and pollutant concentration. The microscale numerical simulation of wind speed and pollutant dispersion in an urban-like environment benefits from taking into account the ABL turbulence. However, this benefit is significantly less important than that described in the literature for the Oklahoma City Joint Urban 2003 real case. The present study highlights that pollutant dispersion simulation improvement when accounting for ABL turbulence is dependent on the specific configuration of the city.

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Notes

  1. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their in-depth review and their constructive comments. We would like to thank the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for providing access to the MUST data. We would like to thank Mélanie Rochoux, Laëticia Thouron, Antoine Verrelle and Franck Auguste for the helpful discussions so as Quentin Rodier and Juan Escobar for their precious help with Meso-NH. Tim Nagel’s postdoctoral position was funded by the FCS-STAE foundation and the IRT Saint-Exupéry, Toulouse, under the PPM project and by the EU LIFE climate change adaptation 2018 project Generate REsiliENt actions agaiNst the HEat islAnd effect on uRban Territory (Green Heart; LIFE18 CCA/FR/001150).

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  1. Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (Météo-France), 42 Avenue Gaspard Coriolis, 31057, Toulouse, France

    Tim Nagel, Robert Schoetter, Valéry Masson & Christine Lac

  2. Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Environnement Atmosphérique, Joint Laboratory ENPC - EDF R&D, CHATOU Cedex, France

    Bertrand Carissimo

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  1. Tim Nagel
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Correspondence to Tim Nagel.

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Nagel, T., Schoetter, R., Masson, V. et al. Numerical Analysis of the Atmospheric Boundary-Layer Turbulence Influence on Microscale Transport of Pollutant in an Idealized Urban Environment. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 184, 113–141 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-022-00697-7

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