Evaluation of the QUIC-URB fast response urban wind model for a cubical building array and wide building street canyon

This paper describes the QUIC-URB fast response urban wind modeling tool and evaluates it against wind tunnel data for a 7 × 11 cubical building array and wide building street canyon. QUIC-URB is based on the Röckle diagnostic wind modeling strategy that rapidly produces spatially resolved wind fields in urban areas and can be used to drive urban dispersion models. Röckle-type models do not solve transport equations for momentum or energy; rather, they rely heavily on empirical parameterizations and mass conservation. In the model-experiment comparisons, we test two empirical building flow parameterizations within the QUIC-URB model: our implementation of the standard Röckle (SR) algorithms and a set of modified Röckle (MR) algorithms. The MR model attempts to build on the strengths of the SR model and introduces additional physically based, but simple parameterizations that significantly improve the results in most regions of the flow for both test cases. The MR model produces vortices in front of buildings, on rooftops and within street canyons that have velocities that compare much more favorably to the experimental results. We expect that these improvements in the wind field will result in improved dispersion calculations in built environments.