Turbulence within and above real and artificial urban canopies

Sonic anemometer data was taken in the Mock Urban Setting Test (MUST) and Joint Urban 2003 (JU2003) field experiments. MUST consisted of a 10 by 12 aligned array of obstacles each 12.2 m long, 2.42 m wide and 2.54 m high located in Utah’s Great Basin Desert. MUST was intended to provide a near full scale geometrically idealized model of an urban area imbedded with the atmospheric surface layer with relatively few topographical effects. JU2003 was performed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma providing a real urban environment also devoid of major topographical effects. Numerous 2D and 3D sonic anemometers were concentrated in a single urban canyon in both experiments providing relatively high instrumentation densities. This paper details the comparison of the turbulence present in the artificial urban canopy of MUST with that which was present in the real urban canopy of JU2003. Velocity spectra, turbulent flux cospectra, turbulence intensities, and mean quantities will be compared and contrasted for the dominant length and time scales, onset of isotropy and pseudo-isotropic behavior, and mean flow features.