Identification of Extreme Urban Wind Hazards in Complex Built Environments

Climate change has intensified extreme wind events, posing growing threats to human safety, infrastructure, and urban resilience. These risks are amplified in densely populated and highly urbanized regions, where increasing intensity and unpredictability of tropical cyclones, frontal wind systems, and tornadic phenomena interact with complex built environments. Urban areas are particularly vulnerable due to the so-called urban corridor effect, in which densely arranged buildings locally accelerate and channel wind flow. Although observational networks and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models have achieved notable success in forecasting large-scale wind events, their performance remains limited in urban settings because of insufficient horizontal and vertical resolution. To overcome these limitations, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been increasingly coupled with NWP models, offering enhanced representation of urban-scale wind fields. However, CFD applications require prescribed boundary and initial conditions, and extreme wind events—such as cyclones, downbursts, and tornadoes—exhibit diverse temporal and spatial characteristics that must be identified in advance. In this study, the temporal features of observed wind speeds along the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula, a region frequently affected by various extreme wind events, were systematically analyzed. Wind events were classified into representative wind scenarios using meteorological pattern recognition based on K-means clustering. By identifying common atmospheric patterns, refined wind fields can be pre-simulated using CFD for each representative scenario. These precomputed wind scenarios enable rapid application to real-time events, facilitating high-resolution estimation of urban wind fields under extreme conditions. The proposed framework supports timely risk assessment and mitigation strategies for urban wind disasters. This research was supported by the Technology Development Program for Strengthening Resilience Against Urban Wind Disasters (Grant No. RS-2025-02220682), funded by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety (MOIS), Republic of Korea.