A rapid modeling method for urban microscale meteorology and its applications.

This paper introduces a fast urban microscale meteorological model with a horizontal resolution of O(10) m, named URBAN (Urban Rapid & Building-Aware Neighborhood), which is capable of rapid assessment of meteorological fields over key urban areas, including wind speed, air temperature, humidity and thermal comfort index, with the execution time less than 10 minutes consuming 1 CPU core. URBAN uses a fast wind diagnostic method to construct three-dimensional (3-D) wind fields surrounding complex building clusters with their geometry resolved explicitly To enhance the accuracy of wind reconstruction and the continuity of the initial wind field around irregular buildings, we propose a new parameterization method based on stream functions, which can accurately characterize the influences of complex urban building clusters on the three-dimensional wind field The model can provide various results for the meteorological service of large outdoor activities, including conventional meteorological elements (wind, temperature, humidity, radiation, etc.) and the Universal Thermal Comfort Index, which is derived from the relationship between physiological processes and environmental meteorological conditions. In this paper, URBAN is applied to develop an automatic analysis and forecast system of microscale meteorological elements over the central Beijing region in summer during a large outdoor event. By comparing with the half-hourly observations from three auto weather stations (AWSs) in the region, the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of the modeled 10-meter-height wind speed, 2-meter-height air temperature and humidity are 0.98 m s−1,1.37 °C and 7.37%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]