Meso-to-microscale building-resolving simulations of fine-scale flow features associated with the urban landscape of Tulsa, OK in preparation for the WINDMAP IOP

A climatology of street-scale winds and turbulence intensities is developed to aid in planning for Advanced Air Mobility in the Tulsa, OK region – in support of the developing advanced air transit corridor which will ultimately connect Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The climatology of street-scale winds will focus on the early morning transit time period using a set of cases that characterize the range of conditions most likely to be encountered in September. The month of September was chosen because it coincides with the 2024 International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) flight week which will consist of flights by numerous Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) to collect measurements of winds and turbulence throughout the Tulsa downtown region and neighboring suburbs. These measurements will be used to evaluate simulated winds and turbulent eddies representing the characteristics of the flow around buildings resolved at the street scale which is necessary for planning safe and efficient AAM air flow structures in urban areas. High resolution wind maps of winds and turbulence will be produced using NCAR’s resident-GPU Large-Eddy Simulation model (FastEddy^TM) run at a building-resolving resolution of 2 m grid spacing. Meso-to-microscale coupling will be done by forcing the FastEddy^TM simulations at the lateral boundaries with output from WRF mesoscale model simulations run at 1 km grid spacing. As part of the NASA ULI-funded Weather Intelligent Navigation Data and Models (WINDMAP), UAS and a vertically pointing Doppler Lidar will be deployed by Oklahoma State University in the fall of 2023 to collect measurements of the mean and turbulent quantities of flows near buildings as well as upwind and downwind of the Tulsa downtown region. These measurements along with other available observational datasets will be used to assess the fidelity of the FastEddy^TM simulations prior to the 2024 Flight Week Campaign. The results will be used to guide planning of upcoming WINDMAP activities and ISARRA flight week which is schedule for September 2024. Ultimately, these types of climatological simulations and ground truth observations can be used to build hazard potential maps that indicate areas where winds or turbulence may exceed the performance characteristics across a range of atmospheric conditions.