Airflow and diffusion modeling for forested and urbanized areas

In order to improve the present application of mesometeorological modeling to fire and forest meteorology problem, a higher resolution, micrometeorological analysis will provide a more local and relevant set of meteorological conditions that directly affect forested areas and surrounding communities. As a result of the increased resolution, i.e. 100m (40 to 400m), the morphology of land features must become part of the underlying surface's interaction with the boundary layer of the atmosphere. For analyses with computational grids of 100m in x and y, morphological features such as vegetation, buildings, and simple surfaces can be more important than the change in elevation over a 100m x 100m grid. USARL's high resolution wind model with canopy and building effects is applied to several non-homogenous, terrain-morphology scenarios to exhibit which forces dominate the resultant flow fields. Example solutions are given for minimum, modest, and complex terrain and again for added presence of morphological features upon the flow fields. These wind fields are then prepared for to drive a dispersion code. These simulations show that there can be notable differences between the morphology simulations versus the terrain-only influenced wind fields. These differences, of course, are seen also in the resultant dispersion analyses. These simulation methods can be applied to: (1) a finer analysis of wildfire behavior, (2) management of smoke from a controlled burn, (3) training personnel on airflow and diffusion behavior in their domain, (4) post analysis of fires, burns, etc in terms of "what went wrong", and (5) provide more definitive meteorological analysis to support the monitoring of fuels and atmospheric conditions - hourly and daily