Microscale Weather Impacts on Efficiency of Daytime/Nighttime UAM/AAM Operations in Urban Domains

The Joint Outdoor-indoor Urban Large Eddy Simulation (JOULES) model is a full-physics GPU resident LES code capable of simulating the effects of surface obstacles (e.g. buildings), complex terrain and heterogeneous land use on the atmosphere. Previous work with the model has shown that JOULES can be a useful tool for forecasting microscale turbulence in urban domains for UAM/AAM operations. The recent development of JOULES-NWP has extended the model’s capabilities beyond a traditional periodic solver to allow for the downscaling of large flow into time varying lateral LES boundary conditions. Furthermore, the development of operational data pre-processing pipelines has allowed this capability to be generalized across several common Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models (HRRR, ERA5, & WRF) enabling an NWP forecasting service that can provide stakeholders with detailed forecast meteorology and turbulence in the urban domain at the meter scale. The time varying lateral boundary conditions of JOULES-NWP allow the user to forecast the development and collapse of the urban boundary layer and the associated turbulence along urban flight corridors. Throughout the development of a forecasting system and the operational cycling of the model in urban flight corridors, it has become apparent that stakeholders can optimize their flights by scheduling their operations to accommodate the temporal dynamics of the large-scale flow. By targeting quiescent periods to fly operators can reduce their uncertainty weather along the flight path and optimize their ability to operate resulting in longer and more frequent sorties.

We present a set of experiments in which the JOULES-NWP model was used to generate forecast turbulence products for 24-hour periods in urban domains. Along path turbulence was calculated for a synthetic fleet assuming a sliding departure windosw. Individual and bulk statistics were calculated during the sorites. We highlight the turbulence profiles that are incurred by aircraft throughout operations that span the diurnal cycle and demonstrate opportunities to optimize aircraft operations (from a weather perspective) by varying departure time. We will also present recent updates to the JOULES-NWP system and present current cycling domains of operations.