Multi-scale analysis of flow over heterogeneous urban enviornments

Abstract: A multi-scale planar-averaging framework for urban areas is developed which enables efficient computation of coarse-grained quantities. We apply the multi-scale framework to a large-eddy simulation of an idealised heterogeneous urban environment of 512 buildings based on a typical London height distribution. We observe that for this geometry, the characteristic urban lengthscale l \approx 50 m, which is the averaging lengthscale L at which as much variance in the flow is resolved as is unresolved. For L>400 m, the statistics become approximately homogeneous, suggesting that non-building-resolving numerical weather prediction (NWP) models can be applied without modification at resolutions of 400 m and above for the case under consideration. We derive the multi-scale plane- and Reynolds-averaged momentum equation and show that for neutral cases, NWP models require parameterisation of the distributed drag and the unresolved turbulence and dispersive stress.We show that the universal drag parameterisation from Sutzl et al. 2020 (Bound-Layer Meteorol.178:225-248) holds reasonably well for resolutions L above 200 m. Below this value the problem becomes inhomogeneous and the parameterisation works less well. The unresolved stresses are well represented by a k-w closure with a value of w=0.4/s. However, an even more accurate closure can be derived from the Sutzl drag parameterisation that does not require further turbulence information.