Wind and Urban Climates

Wind tunnel studies were made of forces on a building in an urban environment. The experiments served to illustrate the effect of surroundings on a typical building complex on the University Campus of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Already during construction of the building, piezometers were installed on more than 50 points flush the walls of a 5-story building. Pressure distributions were determined for typical wind conditions, and the results were compared with wind tunnel results on a model of the same building. Because excellent agreement was obtained, we concluded that wind tunnel results on buildings in different configurations of urban building complexes could be used to infer possible modifications of wind force codes for buildings in urban areas. Differences between free standing buildings, used for obtaining load coefficients for building standards, with the same type of building, in an urban environment, were used to infer necessary corrections, if any, for modification of design codes.