Simulation of turbulent flows over a forested hill using a Lattice Boltzmann model

A Lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) prototype was developed recently at US Army Research Laboratory to simulate the complex environmental turbulent flows. The model can accommodate the mechanical and thermal forces of complex forested terrains and can utilize the processing power of many-core architectures (e.g., GPUs and MICs) to accelerate the computation. As an initial validation process, we used LBM to simulate the turbulent boundary layer flows over a forested, bell-shaped hill. Some results are compared with the available analytical solution and field observational results. The effects of atmospheric stability conditions on the flows were also explored using the model.