The release of CBRN agents in an urban center and the subsequent exposure, deposition, and contamination are emerging threats. Defence Research and Development Canada' Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear (CBRN) research and technology initiative (CRTI) represents the response of the Canadian government and scientific community to find solutions to address these challenges.

Under funding from CRTI, the Environmental Emergency Response (EER) section of the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC), together with research partners, has been developing an advanced simulation capability for urban area CBRN agents, transport and dispersion modeling. Work in the past 4 years has resulted in the development of a prototype for a Canadian “Advanced Emergency Response System for CBRN Hazard Prediction and Assessment for the Urban Environment”. This multi-scale modeling system increases our capability to model and simulate the mean flow, turbulence and concentration fields in urban areas. This system is called the Canadian Urban Flow and Dispersion Modeling System (CUDM).

The system includes a meteorological urbanized meso-scale model (UrbanGEM) used to drive a micro-scale CFD flow model (UrbanSTREAM). The micro-scale model simulates the mean wind and turbulence fields to feed both an Eulerian dispersion model (UrbanEU) and/or a Lagrangian Stochastic dispersion model (UrbanLS); making predictions of concentration fields resulting from releases of contaminants such as CBRN agents. The evaluation of predicted flow and concentration fields of CUDM system was done by comparing results with an observation datasets provided by the Oklahoma City field campaign Joint URBAN 2003.

This developed prototype system is being configured to be applied to the major Canadian cities in the context of a new CRTI funded project.