Research08

Description: To continue the project's studies on the development of improved simulation tools to predict the transport and properties of an aerosol plume from incinerator stacks, or dust from brown fields, in urban regions such as Baltimore for a variety of atmospheric stability and flow conditions. To be able to establish relationships between properties of the urban environment, atmospheric flow and plume dispersion numerical studies will e undertaken which capture the actual scales of motion in the atmosphere using the JHU-LES developed in the first phase of this project (research project 2).

Objectives:

The overall goal of this project is to develop an improved understanding of the role of city landscape heterogeneity on dispersion at urban scales.

Approach:

1. Couple the new generation LES code with a high resolution representation of the city environments from local to more regional scales using the embedded mesh technique in conjunction with a Lagrangian tracer model to model dispersion from sources such as in South Baltimore Hazardous Incinerator or brown fields.

2. Implement thermal forcing from buildings and surrounding urban landscape in the JHU - LES model.

3. With LES simulations of dispersion, being to assess the role of the city surface heterogeneity and mesoscale flow field on dispersion and test the performance of the modeling approach against Baltimore field data sets.

4. Continue to interface this project with related atmospheric projects (e.g. Ondov) on incinerator sources and brown field site emissions into the atmosphere by maintaining supporting field measurements of heat and momentum fluxes with sonic anemometers and use the new field data set to test our simulations.

Supplemental Keywords:

Research Project 8