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Numerical analyses of environmental discharges are commonly conducted on pre-generated numerical grids with refinements implemented in regions of interest or influence on the flow field. This approach to problem formulation relies on insights into the flow specifics so that appropriate attention is given to relevant segments of the domain. In this paper we investigated the applicability of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) on a commonly considered environmental problem—a jet in crossflow. The assessment was made using the OpenFOAM toolbox. Several RANS turbulence models and grid generation approaches were compared in terms of accuracy to previous studies and experimental results. Main emphasis is given to the computational efficiency of the methodology with a focus on load distribution. Our findings indicate that the results are acceptable in terms of accuracy with load balancing providing significant computational savings thus enabling AMR methodology to outperform the conventional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]