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A better understanding of the interaction between the built environment and the atmosphere is required to more effectively manage urban airsheds. This paper reports an analysis of data from an atmospheric measurement campaign in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, during the summer of 2003 that shows wind flow patterns, turbulence, and thermal effects in the downtown area. Experimental measurements within a street canyon yielded airflow patterns, stability conditions, and turbulence properties as a function of the incoming wind direction and time of the day. Air and surface temperatures at two different sites, one within the downtown urban canyon and the other in a nearby park, were measured. A study of the stability conditions within the urban canyon during the campaign indicates that dynamically stable conditions did not occur within the canyon. This provides evidence that the built environment can strongly influence the thermal characteristics in cities. Mean flow patterns close to the street level are analyzed for two different ranges of incoming wind directions and are compared with those obtained from a previous field experiment featuring idealized building configurations. This paper presents an approach allowing the estimation of wind direction in an urban canyon, given inflow conditions, that shows good agreement with wind patterns in the Oklahoma City street canyon. Turbulence statistics were calculated and normalized using different velocity scales to investigate the efficacy of the latter in specifying turbulence levels in urban canopies. The dependence of turbulence quantities on incoming wind direction and time of the day was investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Realistic Urban Spread and Transport of Intrusive Contaminants (RUSTIC) model has been developed as a simplified computational fluid dynamics model with a k–ω turbulence model to be used to provide moderately fast simulations of turbulent airflow in an urban environment. RUSTIC simulations were compared with wind tunnel measurements to refine and “calibrate” the parameters for the k–ω model. RUSTIC simulations were then run and compared with data from five different periods during the Joint Urban 2003 experiment. Predictions from RUSTIC were compared with data from 33 near-surface sonic anemometers as well as 8 sonic anemometers on a 90-m tower and a sodar wind profiler located in the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, central business district. The data were subdivided into daytime and nighttime datasets and then the daytime data were further subdivided into exposed and sheltered sonic anemometers. While there was little difference between day and night for wind speed and direction comparisons, there was considerable difference for the turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) comparisons. In the nighttime cases, RUSTIC overpredicted the TKE but without any correlation between model and observations. On the other hand, for the daytime cases, RUSTIC underpredicted the TKE values and correlated well with the observations. RUSTIC predicted both winds and TKE much better for the exposed sonic anemometers than for the sheltered ones. For the 90-m tower location downwind of the central business district, RUSTIC predicted the vertical profile of wind speed and direction very closely but underestimated the TKE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]