Quick calculation of wind field in urban area within a free and open source GIS: evaluation of the URock model
- 1Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
- 2LOCIE, University Savoie Mont-Blanc, Le Bourget du Lac, France
- 3Lab-STICC, Université Bretagne Sud, Vannes, France
- 4Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Life Science, Vienna, Austria
The wind speed varies significantly within a neighborhood due to building and vegetation size and position. A good estimation of these spatial variations is useful for several applications (outdoor thermal comfort, air pollution, building energy consumption and thermal comfort, etc.) but might be time-consuming using Computational Fluid Dynamic tools and difficult to produce for non experts.
URock is a Python library that has been developped within UMEP, a city-based climate service tool integrated as plug-in in the free and open source QGIS software. It is based on the Röckle approach already used in non open source softwares such as QUIC-URB and SkyHelios: first an initial wind field is set according to empirical laws derived from wind tunnel observations; second the mass air flow is balanced minimizing the modifications of the initial wind field. This method is less accurate than traditional CFD method but quicker and simple to implement for non specialists. This work presents the evaluation of URock against wind tunnel observations.
Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 896069.
How to cite: Bernard, J., Lindberg, F., and Oswald, S.: Quick calculation of wind field in urban area within a free and open source GIS: evaluation of the URock model, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-16480, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16480, 2023.
