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Heat exchange processes between building walls and external air within street canyons is an important topic in air quality modelling considering that the thermal fields largely affect local flow dynamics and pollutant concentration distribution. Despite the abundance of numerical studies, many questions still remain unanswered, ultimately limiting the inclusion of heat effects in mesocale atmospheric models. Of interest in this study is the assessment of radiative processes at building walls in terms of emissivity (i.e. is the ratio of the thermal radiation from a surface to the radiation from an ideal black surface at the same temperature), shape factors (i.e. the proportion of the radiation which leaves the surface of a building and strikes toward the surface of another building) and their relation to the Richardson number. The study is approached via the computational fluid dynamics code OpenFOAM, with large eddy simulations (LES) extension to model turbulence within the canyon and Boussinesq approach to model heat transfer. Consequences on pollutant concentrations are also analysed. A model for setting the thermal boundary conditions on the building surfaces is developed, based on a database that gives the correlations between the emissivity of a surface and the heat flux emitted by this surface, under certain weather conditions, as a function of the latitude and longitude of the surface, the orientation, the time of the day. As a novel result an exponential law between the transfer coefficient and Ri (as well as with the emissivity) is proposed as a function of the canyon aspect ratio., Comment: Conference paper presented at the HARMO18 conference in Bologna (http://www.harmo18.eu/)

A novel set of wind tunnel measurements of the drag force and its spatial distribution along aligned arrays of cubes of height H and planar area index lambdap (air gap between cubes) equal to 0.028 (5H) to 0.69 (0.2H) is presented and analysed. Two different types of measurements are compared: one type where the drag force is obtained using the standard load cell method, another type where the drag force is estimated by measuring the pressure difference between windward and the leeward facades. Results show that the drag force is nearly uniformly distributed for lower lambdap (0.028 and 0.0625), it decreases up to 50% at the second row for lambdap=0.11, and it sharply decreases for larger lambdap (from 0.25 to 0.69) where the force mostly acts on the first row. It follows that for the lowest lambdap the drag force typically formulated as a drag area corresponds to the total frontal area of the array, whereas for large lambdap the drag area corresponds to the area of the first row. By assessing the driving pressure for ventilation from the drag force, the analysis is extended to estimate the cross ventilation as an example of application of this type of measurements.

Travel demand management measures/policies are important to sustain positive changes among individuals' travel behaviour. An integrated agent-based microsimulation platform provides a rich framework for examining such interventions to assess their impacts using indicators about demand as well as supply side. This paper presents an approach, where individual schedules, derived from a lighter version of an activity-based model, are fed into a MATSIM simulation framework. Simulations are performed for two European cities i.e. Hasselt (Belgium), Bologna (Italy). After calibrating the modelling framework against aggregate traffic counts for the base case, the impacts of a few traffic management policies (restricting car access, increase in bus frequency) are examined. The results indicate that restricting car access is more effective in terms of reducing traffic from the network and also shifting car drivers/passengers to other modes of travel. The enhancement of bus infrastructure in relation to increase in frequency caused shifting of bicyclist towards public transport, which is an undesirable result of the policy if the objective is to improve sustainability and environment. In future research, the framework will be enhanced to integrate emission and air dispersion models to ascertain effects on air quality as a result of such interventions., Comment: Post-print

Measurements of small-scale turbulence made over the complex-terrain atmospheric boundary layer during the MATERHORN Program are used to describe the structure of turbulence in katabatic flows. Turbulent and mean meteorological data were continuously measured at multiple levels at four towers deployed along the East lower slope (2-4 deg) of Granite Mountain. The multi-level observations made during a 30-day long MATERHORN-Fall field campaign in September-October 2012 allowed studying of temporal and spatial structure of katabatic flows in detail, and herein we report turbulence and their variations in katabatic winds. Observed vertical profiles show steep gradients near the surface, but in the layer above the slope jet the vertical variability is smaller. It is found that the vertical (normal to the slope) momentum flux and horizontal (along the slope) heat flux in a slope-following coordinate system change their sign below and above the wind maximum of a katabatic flow. The vertical momentum flux is directed downward (upward) whereas the horizontal heat flux is downslope (upslope) below (above) the wind maximum. Our study therefore suggests that the position of the jet-speed maximum can be obtained by linear interpolation between positive and negative values of the momentum flux (or the horizontal heat flux) to derive the height where flux becomes zero. It is shown that the standard deviations of all wind speed components (therefore the turbulent kinetic energy) and the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy have a local minimum, whereas the standard deviation of air temperature has an absolute maximum at the height of wind-speed maximum. We report several cases where the vertical and horizontal heat fluxes are compensated. Turbulence above the wind-speed maximum is decoupled from the surface, and follows the classical local z-less predictions for stably stratified boundary layer., Comment: Manuscript submitted to Boundary-Layer Meteorology (05 December 2014)